Hi everyone
 

So... hello everyone.

Wow. A lot of things have happened here since the last time I came this way. For all of those who have no idea who I am (which is probably 90% of the forum members), my name is Tom Henrik, and I was one of the most active members of Abandonia back in its hayday. This is still evident by the fact that even after all these years of being absent, I still have one of the highest forum post counts. Heh.

Anyways, I decided to crawl back onto the scene and check things out. I intend to stick around for a while, so I look forward to getting to know a lot of you, and hopefully run into some other old relic from Abandonia's past. :OK:

Edit:
Wow. Still have my Staff access.

Hi, Tom. It seems, your posts was so numerous that I didn't notice that you are not around. %)

Yeah. According to my stats, I still have 1.01 post per day I have been "active". :p

What? Tom? You came back? Tom is back? I see it but I don't believe it :) You've been away like what... 8, 9 years? or is it whole 10 years?

How are you? And what have you been doing? And what happened so you decided to drop by?

Yeah, things have change all right, several times :) Place is owned by Sweddish company and is barely alive. You can check the chatbox to get the picture of active memebers. Most of people you might remember are long gone, the ones you disliked included :) To be fair, it is still visited a lot, but forum part not so much.

Dave used to be in charge, backed up by 5th Horseman... if you remember those two that is. I think Dave is still in charge actually although he's not around. Who else is around that you might remember...? Japo, Frodo, Mighty Midget... Eagle of Fire is in charge of Troubleshooting, still active.

lulu and russ might drop by from time to time... and I think that's about it. Not sure even if you remember all of these names :)

You were gone for so long that we had few generations coming and going :) Hard to tell everything in one post, hopefully I didn't left out anyone still active from those days :)

You were still here when Reloaded was launched but I'm not sure who's active over there.

Anyway, you just met Spectre, he's huge oldies collector. You'll surely meet arete, she always around, Clusek, zirkoni, Geezer, TotalAnarchy... not many of staff are regular nowadays.

Interesting bump you just made, well, interesting for me at least :)

Yeah, I remember all those changes, and when Kosta sold the rights to the Studentis group. It's interesting to see how much things have changed.

I did check out the Reloaded forum, but that forum seems to be almost broken. The chatbox won't show up properly for me, and the whole forum itself seems to have lost all of its CSS.

That being said, I also notice that not all forum avatars are visible on this forum, either (like yours and mine). There seems to be little things that have gone missing, due to lack of active staffers.

I also note that the updates have slowed down.

Anyways, it's easy to focus on the negatives. I am just really happy to see that the forum is still active, and that there are still members around from the days of yore. I'll stay active on the forum, but I don't think that I will be able to do much on the main site, due to my own projects taking up most of my time.

In any case, it's nice seeing you again Marko. What have you been up to these last 9 years? :)

Last 9 years? Let me see... growing up mostly :D Now I'm an old bitter man XD

Long story short, finished university and started working, .NET developing mostly. Moved to Austria, got married and waiting for my first child in mid-summer. Not so bitter it would seem :)

What about you? I see that you are in USA now and I "think" I remember Kosta mentioning that to me back then. That was also loooong time ago while Kosta was still around.

As for avatars, well I never uploaded any :smile2: So it works fine in my case :) Could be you need to set it again, since we had some movement of database/domain/engine/whatever so all old transfered accounts might needed some tighting up.

Yeah, updates are slow, which is mainly my fault :) Keep saying to myself that I will manage my time better.

Nice seeing you again. I'm glad if you stay active for a while. This is a bigger schock than when your laptop got stolen back in the days :)

Blimey. I can't believe you remember that! Yeah, that was stolen from me when I lived in Spain... what? Back in 2004 or 5, or so?

And you shouldn't beat yourself up over the updates. The success of this site does not rest on the shoulders of a single person.

But enough about that. Congratulations, man! That is awesome news! I wish your little family all the best! :D

:OK:

Nice meeting you Capo. Looks like you are one of the most active users over here now. :)

Yup, Capo is in charge of social networks and YT channel and stuff. And he does that more than good, but once again, we are not providing him with enough content :(

As for your laptop, IIRC that was a big deal back then. You had bunch of unpublished reviews... and abanodnia was getting closer to review per day. Someone wrote a short history of abandonia some time later and this event was mentioned in the list :) I also remember that shortly after it was stolen (like some weeks later) you published tons of reviews in a few days. But I never knew did you found your laptop or you just sat down and typed them agian...

Also, I was one of those who thought that "Tom" was the user with name "aalberg" or "aaberg" or something similar. You might remember that confusion also :)

Lol. Yeah I do remember that confusion. That was interesting times.

I never did get my laptop back. The issue wasn't that we lost a lot of unpublished reviews (although that did suck immensely). The main issue was that my computer had all the passwords and backend access points to Abandonia's server, the Reloaded server, as well as some other sites that Kosta and I worked on - including personal information for myself and others. I had a bunch of access to a lot of information, and that could easily be misused by someone.

As a result, we had to ban my account, and start redoing a lot of security features, while getting me back into the game again.

The positive outcome of this was that security was improved across the board, but also this sparked the initiative to have daily updates. I felt so bad for all the reviews and future updates that were lost, that I went into hyper-drive and mass produces reviews and updates to fill up the server. This inspired others to do the same, and thus the daily updates were born.

o_o shite Tom good to see you by Jove!! :tom:

You know it's been long when I am an admin now. I wonder if you remember me as a user or updater or from AR after so long. To clarify some of Marko's updates...

It's now a different Swedish company, Abovo. Studentis went apparently bust and Abandonia must have been bought out instead of scrapped (fortunately I guess), not that we got much information about that. Same old, but at least these people answer emails, and fix some things if they notice the water from the engine room reaching the passenger's necks :P

I'm sure Horseman will post as soon as he sees this... actually I'll irc him right now. He and Lulu are now as big lurkers as Titan, but still around. Dave has been in indefinite absence for... a couple of years? His being nominally head honcho was some kind of armistice appointment from Romano if I cared to recall correctly (so no comment there... but the dissident drama is finally over for good) and well it's also the fact that Dave was working so much for the site, he is the best guy 1st of all. EOF resigned from Troubleshooting moderation long ago -- there Spectre and I were in charge though I think he's likely forgotten it again :P

Updates are slow because of lack of work and because they involve even more manual work now than back in your days and the "new" website is full of bugs (and "full" is not a figure of speech here). The avatars were lost during the Apocalypse when Kosta remade the website with Studentis. Once a year or so we like to idly discuss big plans (just check the admin and updaters' boards) about how to fix everything. Well the current owners respond to our emails so we could propose something if we wanted.

I expect this appearance of yours to make a couple of old lurkers pop their heads out :-) And I will check your website later!

Well, you know everything about me in charge. ;P Mostly that I am here, but rarely can intervene for good - so usually pass it by. I remove spam when I see it though. :)

I remind then that Famous Tag Bug is still here and kicking. ;) So feel free to remind about it to the owners. :)

Of course I remember you, Japo. It's nice to see that you are still around, and that you have moved up in the ranks. :OK:

It seems like a lot of things have changed, but at the same time a lot of things have stayed the same.

I wish that I could help you guys out with server issues and so on, but when the ownership changed, so did everything else. I don't have access to anything anymore. :(

We have no server issues, we're golden we can host full CD images directly now, it runs fast and smooth (finally)... Only problem is the website coded on this server is a pile of **** :P

They're now busy checking why users aren't able to get verification emails to change your email or password... Actually they're busy with whatever other backend maintenance issues and will look into this afterwards. Later if they do fix it I can tell them about the tags, if that's the highest priority.

Well, can't say I'm active on the forum, but when such a legend returns you just have to say "Hi!".

In all honesty my first thought was that some funny guy or gal necro'd some old thread of Tom's. XD

Hey Tom. Good to see you again. :smile2:

Shame you can't access Reloaded forums properly, would love to see you (and Tai) over there again. But yeah, it's pretty much a mess now. Abovo are not exactly helpful to Reloaded. When they first took over, I asked them SO MANY times to fix things, or give us access to fix things, but my emails pretty much went unanswered. So in the end, I gave up asking. :suspicious:
Reloaded is basically the unwanted child. :suspicious:
As well as that, they took away access to the server, so we can't store games\reviews on the server anymore, like we used to. Can't tell you how annoying that is! AB are lucky in that respect - they have huge space on the server. :max:

Yeah. That's what I meant with the server issues. AB is fine, but AR is banging their heads against the wall.

And, Branjo, your post just made me laugh out loud. Yeah, I guess I kinda necro'ed myself. ;)

We can try writing about the issues of both AR and AB together in case it could get Abovo's attention better. Although in case AR gives less income I'm sure that's all they care about, together with what takes the minimal effort to fix... But we can try.

Oh. That guy is back again. Yay for the site. I guess. You used to kick ass of people left and right back then... literally. Wouldn't be that much surprised if you'd start with that sometime soon, again.
Aaberg used to be a different Norwegian user back in the days, didn't stay active for long, though. Most of the old, though comparably "younger" staff like Sebatianos and Data, were banned long time ago, as well, due to their "dissident" thing going on, when they supposedly tried to bring Kosta back to control of the site. Things used to be rather turbulent around here, once.
I'd be surprised if he mentioned the smurf's closest-running contender for the post counts, back then, in ye olde days. Before he removed that competition, that is.

Well, we were all a lot younger back in those days. While I do not condone all the craziness that happened, I do understand it. That is one of the problems when you work tirelessly for something you believe in, only to feel that your work isn't appreciated.

That happened to all of us.

But all the history that I have had on this site and AR, did help shape me to the person I am today. While I have been away from the scene for several years, I have been constantly thinking about all the ways we went wrong, and what we should have done to fix it. All of this experience (and a huge amount of money) have gone into creating ViGERP, which is basically the result of ten+ years of hard work and planning.

While I plan on sticking around here as well, it is over there that I am working daily to update the contents. After all, that is my baby, and one that I plan on doing right from the start.

Wow Scatty why would anyone want to discuss that now.

Incredible that I have to clarify that Data is certainly not banned. Don't make stuff up. Why would he ever be?
Let's not discuss what Sebastianos did in the end to get himself banned, if done against Abovo it would have got him in court.

Sorry, I just named few from the top of my head. But who are you reffering to? Yourself? I haven't seen you posting in a while, could be my mistake, sorry.

I think I can second this. I don't remember Data being in some quarrel. Plus I think abandonia owes him a favour or two, which was probably never much known.

Yeah, Seb, Romano, Blood-Piggy... I remember they caused some trouble. Although I was on good terms with everyone and I liked staying out of trouble. We had another big trouble afterwards called Saccade, but that doesn't matter really. I hope we are all a bit older now :) Except for dosraider, that is :D

It has been many many years since the dissident issue, but this was a dark time in AB's history. One that I was hoping wouldn't resurface, but something so big will always rise up to the top.

So, in the interest of trying to clear up what happened and why, here is the full story behind the events that led to the creation of the dissident forum.

Sebatianos was an idealist. He had some great ideas, and he was a very hard worker. Unfortunately, he also had a bad temper.

Combine that with a lot of server access and power, and you have a ticking timebomb. The real reason for the whole dissident issue was that Kosta and myself woke up one morning to discover that Seb had gone rogue on the server, and started to delete games, reviews, translations and more. Basically, he was cleaning out our database in a fit of rage, because he felt that he deserved more than he got.

We had to ban his access, ban his account, ban his IP, ban every access point he had, in order to save the site from being destroyed. Kosta and I were both completely in agreement that Seb had gone too far, and that we could not condone his actions. Where we differed was in how to pass judgement.

I felt that had this been anyone else, the person would've been banned on the spot for life. No questions asked. And as such, Sebatianos was no different. He had simply gone too far, and was a liability.

Kosta felt that Seb had done so much for the site, that he wanted to instead have him on a short leash, and remove him from the active community.

This formed the dissident forum, where Seb and anyone who wanted to be with him got access. This was an unmonitored forum, where Kosta would just push problematic members into, instead of having to deal with them.

Unfortunately, since none of us who knew what actually had happened were allowed to talk about it, Seb was creating his own stories about how he had been wronged. He eventually gained quite a following of other users, who all believed his side of the events. Eventually all of the negativity was too much to handle, and the community was split right down the middle.

Even the staff and admins were split. I felt that Kosta should never have created the dissidents, and that it just created more problems and more drama as the years passed by. As such, I had a hard time supporting my boss, as I did not personally believe that he had done the right thing. I felt like every day I was cleaning up a mess that would've been a non-issue if we had only banned Seb and come clean about his actions and why we had banned him as a result. Every day, the forum was littered with posts about how we had wrongfully treated him, and that the "truth" was for anyone to see in the dissident forum. It was almost like watching the start of a civil war, where both sides were recruiting soldiers.

Only a few people knew the truth, and we were not allowed to tell anything to anyone by Kosta. He tied our arms and sealed our lips, because in his mind, this was an issue that would simply pass over time. He expected Sebatianos to simply quit on his own, after being put on a leash. When this did not happen, he did not want to admit that he had been wrong, but instead decided to pretend all the new problems that arose as a result didn't exist.

Kosta was a great owner and leader, but in the later years he grew tired of the sites. AB and AR had been his hobby projects, and a way for him to learn and develop his coding skills. He did not want to get involved in big issues, or take any sides. He hated having to make executive decisions, and he hated having pressure put on him, or admit that he could be wrong in anything.

In the end, this led to him selling the site for money, leaving the community shocked and in disbelief. Very few people even knew that he had plans to sell the site out, and a lot of people (myself included) felt that he had basically sold us as well. We all worked tirelessly without pay for our common love of games, and now we had been sold to make money for an owner who just couldn't be bothered anymore. It was a hard blow for many of us.

When Studentis started plastering ads all over the site in order to create their own personal cashcow, that was the deciding moment that made me pack my bags and leave.

I hope this will help some of you understand why things happened and why. I will gladly answer any questions you have, in the hopes that maybe we can finally put all of this behind us and move on.

Well no, Data wasn't banned, sorry for the misunderstanding. He left on his own, to the other forum Seb created (which I had a few visits to, back then), as far as I know - which is possibly not as much as some others do. I was a bit active at the Dissident sub-forum at that time... what followed, with the mentioned Seb-war, felt bit too weird for my taste, which is why I chose to remain with Abandonia and Fifth as the main admin back then. And I think personal issues Seb had in real life played some role in his actions, which does not justify what was going on, just making it maybe a bit comprehensible.
Anyway, sorry for bringing that old story up in the first place. Just some ancient memories brought up by seeing one of the oldest members of Abandonia back. What was past is past now.

I could not agree more, Scatty.

There has definitely been a lot of ups and downs throughout Abandonia's history. I think that every community will have moments that they are not proud of, and moments they cherish. The whole dissident issue is without a doubt the darkest event.

However, I do also think that it helped many of us grow up really fast. We all learned a lot from the whole issue, and hopefully something like this will never happen again.

And, I understand why seeing my old face again would stir up some of those memories. I am just glad to be back, and to be a part of the community again. It makes me miss some of the good old days. :)

I don't actually know at all why Data decided to leave definitely, but I wouldn't think it was mainly because of this. First of all as far as I knew he was responsible for a lot of the coding of the old website. I would understand if he got pissed when it was replaced by this Studentis version, speciallys since I think it was made without his involvent or at least decisions were taken against his advice.

Secondly it's normal for people to leave because of many reasons, no need to blame any of the drama... Tom did, Maikel, many other admins, Dave, others went lurking Titan, Horseman etc. and check back ever less frequently until they also stop doing it.

The last incident with Seb that got him finally banned permanently was kinda similar but he staged a coup by blocking access for other admins. In the end he and Romano must have realized that the coup was untenable, no idea what they discussed or negotiated with the admins, but gave up on the condition that they considered Dave more neutral than the older admins who had put up with shit before. That may have been so but Seb was this time banned as a matter of course.

I believe it was around this time that I became a little more involved and became updater. We brought back daily updates for a little while. TheChosen was very active at the time. Most of the time however I have never paid much attention or managed or cared to keep informed about the drama. I always enjoyed AB but not so much for even socializing as for playing games first, later discussing them, and later helping preserving them. This later part has become increasingly frustrating since the Studentis takeover.

I am sure Data left for a number of reasons. While I do not know the specifics (as he left after I did), I do know that he had a lot of other items on his plate. It would make sense that with the change in ownership, combined with all the drama and everything else that happened on AB, that he would simple leave to focus on his other projects.

He, like Kosta, was a coder and a programmer first, and a community person second. So, if he felt like he didn't get to expand his coding skills, it makes sense that he would want to pursue it elsewhere.

@Japo
I completely agree that we need to preserve old video games, and this is already frustrating enough with large companies caring more about the name rights, than the games themselves, but when you add a different owner who doesn't share your views, then it becomes almost impossible. That is why I started my own site, in order to preserve as much about the games as possible. While I (for legal issues) can't offer every game for free download, I do try to do whatever I can to preserve the content, if not the actual game files. However, games that I get permission to host (like freeware), I do put up for free download for anyone to enjoy.

Wow. Tom. Been ages since I last had seen you.
Probably was a mere user myself back when you stopped coming around.

Been Lurking myself for years now though.
However. Never removed the Abandonia Tab from my browser startup list. :)

Just got too busy with life and everything else really, while keeping an eye at this place.

Yeah, I think we all got caught up in real life events. I think there is a period where we all have to take a break and focus on something that will pay our bills, instead of pursuing a passion.

But yeah, I do remember you as just a user from back in the day. Funny to come back and see you as an Admin. You outrank me, right now. :lol:

A shift in passion also helps to prevent someone going to old places.
At some point I just went on to Play games more then to take care of a platform of preservation. :)

My rank grew on me by site necessity.
From mere mod of a section to one of the Supermods that kept the place together, when moderators were vastly needed and in short supply.

Becoming an Admin felt more as a consolidation of capabilities though back then.

Though, nowadays, I feel to much out of the loop to know how to help or know where to help.
Downside of lurking around this much I guess.

Welcome back Tom, one of the kindest person I met here long time ago.

I remember I was starting to help around when you left, you had this halloween pumpkin as avatar :smile2:
And oh damn, how cute the old site was.
(Surprise! See below)

Too bad we didn't manage to work together on the site, your dedication was admirable and I can't deny you have been of some inspiration to me.


Long story short...

I've dedicated years to this place, helping around, organizing things, assembling Staff, doing politics with new site owners...
I've worked with some of the extraordinary people you can see here, who had the patience to share and bear some of my visions and projects.

(I greet you all btw, I hope you are fine :))

During the migration to Drupal we had huge problems, we woke up in the morning and the site was different, so we just started to figure things out. I started studying Drupal to understand what we could / couldn't do and after some months of work we obtained some good results.
We didn't have much control on the site, so we tried to do our best to make things running again, we pushed the social side using social networks and organizing some competitions / games.

I had lot of fun and I can say that this place grew me up.
Of course there was lot of drama, it has always been periodical in this place, but the positive things were more than the negative, so I had the strenght to go ahead, even with all those problems.

We tried to collect some memories of this place, you may want to check the historical page, just in case you haven't done it yet: http://www.abandonia.com/en/story

There's also your picture on it :smile2:

Data helped us alot and decided to stop his official presence as admin. He registered as a normal user because he had a public and social profile that he couldn't associate to Abandonware, and probably just had less time to dedicate to the site. But we had some fun with him, he is a nice person :)

I wish I had the time to follow the site like I did before, but life flows and my spare time is thinner and thinner.
Maybe a day we will rock this place again :)

Ahhh, old site... memories, good times :)

Hi Davide, never read Abandonia Story, cool stuff :OK:

Sad to have missed you, Dave. I looked for the email address you gave me and I couldn't find it :(

Hiiiiiii
I am Alex

Interesting
 

Interesting read on ABs history...cool :OK: :dislike:

Well, it would seem I am half-complete now. Hello, Tom.

And hello to everyone else as well. Glad this one is still around.

Hi, Dino. :) We never met before, it seems... You was absent long, right?

Wow, Dino the OvErLoRd appears :) Now we just need Tulac and Unkown Hero.... and then even Kosta, Niles, Data and Wendymaree would be everydayness :D

Hello, Smiling Spectre. Well, 'long' is quite an understatement. To be frank, it feels like a past life. It was challenging to remember the password, had to give it a few dozen tries. :smile2:

Hello, Marko. :) Familiar names. Glad to see site is up, however messed up it might be. So, how's it going?

Hi Dino nice to see you again... :-) At least compared with most of the rest of the old guard, it looks to me that you never leave, you log in every year or so, which is relatively frequent XD

Well as your old and still present signature would say.... :smile2: Real life is really kicking me lately (in a good way, but time consuming), my precious virtual life is fading. Are you OK? What were you up to these years?


XD