there is still a dev branch in the esr code base that contains most of the work i completed. it's missing some stuff. i don't remember what, but not a lot. i reverted the site, because i decided to stop working on it, and i didn't want to leave unfinished work that could be buggy or something else when there is no other developer to resolve new bugs. there was a major refactor and rework that was like 60% done (thousands and thousands of lines of code with major major structural changes). i didn't want to be the cause of new problems. i would rather be remembered as the guy who tried and then put things back the way they were, than the guy who left a big mess with nobody else to clean it up. i posted about this years ago in response to somebody asking something similar to what you asked.

there was no hissy fit, i just felt like the site wasn't worth working on given what was left of the community. i spent a lot of time posting quake news, updates about development, news for other games, upcoming events, etc., and most of the activity was just haters and complaining, and, to be fair, there wasn't anything quake-wise to change that. it wasn't fun, it was just bitter and sad, and i didn't want to spend any more of my life working on something that facilitated such uninspired ugliness. that's infectious and erodes the spirit. esr community--trolls, writers, whoever--used to be inspired, creative, engaging, and energetic, but all of those people moved on, and i tried and failed to imagine and realize a path for its reinvigoration. i remember somebody said something in discord, and it was like a switch flipped in my head. i just instantly lost all interest, and made a decision to 'rip off the bandaid' and move on.

i deleted my account for the same reasons people typically delete their accounts. i didn't want my data on the site anymore. i deleted other users' accounts who requested it. people value different things, and whatever reasons i give don't mean much to people who doubt me or want to believe something about me that isn't true, so it's not really worth getting into too much detail, but the things i've contributed to this site are frivolous ancient history and life goes on. the site is still here, it still functions as it did before my work, and all of the data is preserved except for my posts. even the replies to my posts are still preserved, they just aren't rendered, because my posts aren't in the database. an enterprising person could find all of the replies to post ids that don't exist and create dummy posts in the database so that those replies show, but to what end? nobody values that enough to realize it. i understand that people enjoy nostalgia and imprisoning superfluous history like funkopops and anime figures in glass boxes, but i don't care about things that way.

i still check this site somewhat regularly. i post sometimes, though it takes a long time to be approved, and is often not approved. i made a post about an item timing trainer that i updated for the first time in a decade, and that wasn't approved. idk why. i only check 3 or 4 web sites anymore. i don't use any social media, and don't have any accounts on anything like that.

of course people will believe whatever they want to believe about the actions of others, and it's out of my control if people believe whatever about the time i spent working on esr. it was a fun period for me for a while, and i learned a lot doing the work that i did. unfortunately, i wasn't a strong enough force of personality and productivity to make a meaningful difference in the state of the site, and, ultimately, i chose to redirect my energy toward other pursuits.

tl;dr the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, but i'm sure demiurge would be happy to allow anybody with some level of competency contribute to the site.

Thanks for the reply. I kind of understand, besides the part about reverting all work.

In my mind, without knowing the details, there simply had to be multiple better alternatives.

I still suspect some deeper motives. Try with everything and fail. Close an old chapter to rid oneself of perceived burden. something along those lines. But of course you are entitled to your own opinion and version of reality.

We all know noone else will try. I'm not at all competent, I could not do that even if I wanted to.
You were the sole protagonist, which was amazing, but who somehow turned out to be the anti-hero by his own accord.

it's hard to understand reverting the work unless you've worked on entirely custom 25 year old spaghetti code that is undocumented and unmaintained and 60% rewritten with totally different patterns. if you come into something like that, it's an overwhelming force, and it takes an insane amount of dedication and discipline or naive ambition to develop the energy to even begin to understand where to start.

if there were or are better alternatives, i didn't and don't know of them. i enjoy hypotheticals, so it would be interesting to read your thoughts. i chose to give the site to somebody who cares about it, and to leave it in the state that it had run for years with minimal maintenance. that felt and still feels like a fair thing to have done.

there were definitely emotions involved in the decision. i did enjoy knowing that when i reverted my changes and stopped posting to the site activity would die, because the haters would lose the fuel source for this particular avenue of their hate. i also felt regret that the people who appreciated the changes would lose that, as well, but the thing about people like that is that, much like the haters, they will find other ways to entertain their natures, and the world will carry on.

things change, things die, the old gives way to the new, the new gives way to the old. it's turtles all the way down, and epstein didn't kill himself.

*EDIT: turns out this homepage spaghetti code is much worse then say a java project, so my analogies were out of place and also a little too personal

my changes weren't just cleaning up behavior or iterative enhancements. i had also removed a lot of antiquated/obsolete/unused behavior to reduce overhead & simplify rendering (sidebar preferences, various profile fields, active users presentation, and on and on). these aren't black and white good things/iterative improvements, they're opinionated amputations. rather than try to salvage some functionality that nobody used, cut it out to become independent from it and reduces its impact on change. that kind of thing.

i also redesigned 90% or more of the site in the process of restructuring and modernizing the css and markup structure. much of the existing css was deleted. more opinionated changes.

if i leave the site to demiurge without reverting, and he and others prefer to have access to all of the things they had access to in the past, that means that either they will be very dissatisfied and cursing me for the rest of their lives, or somebody has to go and manually add that functionality back. adding the functionality back into the restructured code base is not simple, though. it cannot just be copy/pasted, because the sidebar components were changed from procedurally generated to object oriented classes that render presentational data using html templates.

that's just one example of a challenge to keeping my changes without an active developer.

here's some fun trivia. in the current dev branch of the esr code base:

Showing 578 changed files with 18,490 additions and 39,464 deletions.

that's work that i did from june 27, 2023 to november 3, 2023. there were some more changes between then and december, but i don't remember what they were.

to give you an idea of how complex esr source is, the main `index.php`--which essentially acts as the orchestrator of end user experience--is 1555 lines long. that's just one file of hundreds. in this one file, which is interpreted every time a request is made, there are 123 conditional statements, most of which exist to concatenate strings to be returned in the request response. the strings being concatenated are inline html and javascript. the process is fully procedural, so the logic is structured in the same order as the page is rendered. sql requests are sprinkled liberally throughout the index, and since the html and javascript is handled as php strings, there is no useful syntax highlighting. since everything is concatenated into a string procedurally, it's very difficult to understand the document structure, as elements that are children or parents of other elements may be defined in a condition 100 or 500 lines above or below some other definition, etc.

Wow, this sounds pretty bad.

>since the html and javascript is handled as php strings, there is no useful syntax highlighting
Damn. This would need to be solved first for me, if it can be solved, I don't know.

I know it's too late for smartass pointers like this, but I guess there should exist books written for such legacy code problems. I also heard that some programmers program helper tools first, to be able to eficciently work. Maybe this could be applied in such situation....

On the flip side, you are incredible jumping right into it and editing this code to almost a finished solution. That takes real skills and dedication.

it can be seen as bad, but it's also pretty incredible. it's a product of its time, before web development was an academic subject. early php development was wild, and this kind of approach common back then. what was open source? git didn't exist, source repositories were not a fundamental aspect of popular web development as they are now. people were uploading files to ftps with filezilla to make changes.

i don't share the information about esr to talk shit, but to give some context about how unique it is to work on some guy's personal project from the early 2000s.

oh, and i really enjoy refactoring complex work. it's like untangling a knot. that side of things was what i liked most about working with the site.

ps. Epstein is of course still alive

I think internet forums are still very active in some communities. For instance sherdog for MMA is a nice example of an active forum with their own community, which is good to see in this era of social media slop. Of course, we would just need that Quake was popping again.

Btw, could you give me the ability to post without waiting for admin approval? I lost my password on the other account and made a new one and I have to wait for manual approval of each post now.

IIRC, you stop being a "New User" after 10 (approved ;)) comments/posts.