Earlier today I posted an article from DesperateNerdLife’s blog about the closure of the Modding forum Bacman Forums, which I had been a Moderator on almost since the beginning and then left about a year ago.
I, like many others, was shocked to see the 404 Can’t Be Found page when I went to check in and then later realized that he had pulled the plug for good. And to be all honest, I had mixed feelings about this because though it wasn’t a surprise that it had happened, it was the closure of a chapter in my life that I had helped write and now no one could read it.
I mean, I agree with him to some extent that the scene just isn’t there anymore on a large scale and to pay for something no one uses is a bit of an unnecessary expense, but the way he up and pulled the plug and the amount of work people had put into their build logs for future reference I think was a personal statement and a spiteful “F-You” to those who had issues with him.
And that’s just the thing, in my opinion, this wasn’t a closure because the scene was dying as he led others to believe, but because the amount of push back he was getting both internally from his Mods and the community as a whole. He mentions the degradation of the community and if it’s not there, there’s no reason for the site, but it’s hard to keep a community when you alienate even the longest term members because they have a disagreement with you. You can’t be expected to keep a loyal following that way and it became apparent to me a year ago (or sometime well before that really) that unless the he came up with the idea or didn’t do something the way he would do it, it was just wrong.
So this is the reason that I surrendered my Mod title of a forum I had been loyal to a fault and had spend a lot of time to make one of the best console modding sites on the net. It was unfortunate and sad but I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere by staying and it was time for someone else to take the reigns. And in less than a year, it’s gone.
Though, in my previous post, there is a link to a full cached version of the site which he was kind enough to share. It’s 3 Gigs of a zip file but it may be worth it if you put the time into a build log and you’d like to get it back.
So what do you think about it? I can’t have any loyalty to a site that doesn’t exist so the cards are on the table now. He was a good man to me for a majority of the time I worked with him, but his faults began to show and grow and that eventually crept it’s way into the site and it’s content…which then has lead to it’s demise.
Downing's Basement 
Dear Downing,
I was astonished the day I discovered that MBB was going to close.
He declared it early in the morning, with the message I reported on my post, and by the evening the site was already down.
I had the luck and the mental alertness to make a copy of the whole site (although around 5% of the files should be missing due to the site being down before I could complete the process), otherwise everything would have been completely lost.
I can’t understand why one who had put so much effort in building such a good and useful site, would decide to simply flick a switch and destroy everything.
I didn’t know him personally, I cannot comment on anything you say about him.
All I know is that he decided to close shortly after having a strong disagreement with some members during the annual modding competition.
Some of them were moderators at that time and the argument ended with them being banned.
I’m not a great modder myself, nor did I post very often, but I really appreciated the site and visited it every day.
I can feel the size of the scene to be shrinking and this both sad and disappointing.
I know, and it’s not only the fact that he did it with such little warning, it was a complete slap in the face to anyone who contributed to the site with build logs and/or guides/references. Technically, those build logs/guides were other users property and not even giving them the chance or letting them know that the site was closing (one day is hardly reasonable) so they could get their property back if they wanted was a very cold thing to do. I know my build logs were always very through so others could follow along and now they are just gone.
It’d be interesting to see if you could extract certain sections from that forum (like the build logs for example) and provide links to those sections so people can get their stuff back without having to download the whole damn thing I’m sure would make quite a few users happy.
Yeah I caught the tail end of the drama with that Compo and I knew it was going to turn into a shit show when I saw the direction of all the “what if” scenarios that were playing out. I would have liked to have said if I were still a Mod at the time, things would have played out differently, but when you only have a voice and deaf ears are all it falls on, not much is going to come of it.
All in all, I gave it my best while I was there and the diminishing of the community however is a lot more on him than he seemed to have realized. I think there is still life left in the scene, but it has to be geared more toward a wider spectrum of “electronics” modding as a whole and has to embrace newer technology. He hated that idea as he was all about original hardware, which I can respect, but as we found out, that only had a limited amount of life in it when smart phones started to be able to play most retro games out there and it was far “easier” to go that route than actually learn something.
I am bummed but not surprised that this happened though. Such is the way of all things but I would have loved to have kept the site going if he would have allowed it.