So after eleven years of furious debate...

[Vitiman]

Was General the other "hacker attacker"? What happened to that guy, anyway? I remember he was obsessed with Raie (who I believe is now a model, as we all expected would happen). I thought he was pretty creepy at the time, but today his entire persona seems almost innocent to me, given what the modern Internet looks like. The misfit 16-year-olds of the past would post on Super Mario fangame forums, but the misfit 16-year-olds of today are incels.

I actually remember this whole incident quite vividly - it was shortly before I left MFGG prior to the split in the Summer of 2010. Like you, I talked to Char pretty frequently on MSN, usually just about whatever (I actually bonded with him about our shared interest in Metroid: Zero Mission modding, for whatever reason), and he had told me that someone had persistently tried accessing the phpBB admin control panel page via Char's own account. There was no specific evidence it was anyone on the site at the time, but Char in particular seemed really annoyed because it all happened at an odd hour and it was like 5 or 6 of these page loads in a row. I think this may have been when Char was recently made web master, so he might have been viewing this all from phpMyAdmin or something, but he was scrambling to back up the forums at least and that's when he told me he was considering doing this frequently so that nothing serious happens if another Great Mistake occurred (for those of you uninformed, the Great Mistake was when we accidentally gave Cutman Mike and Biddy admin powers on April Fools Day and they deleted the IPB boards - RII had to load a backup from at least a few months prior in January). These either stopped happening anyways, or he never brought them up with me again - it could go either way. I didn't know Char well enough to where I presumed he told me everything, but he also brought up the whole hacker threat unprovoked, so maybe he would have kept me up to date if I asked.

I concur that either Kyori or Char would have a backup if anyone would, but I highly doubt if Char even would have those old backups still if what Treeki said about him was true. If he really was some old kid, then he probably doesn't even have that old computer anymore, if what I know about kids and technology are true! And I do, because I used to be one.

I'd believe that Char was a youngin - the way he spoke to me sounded like someone who wanted to make friends... which would be very strange considering he was this cooler admin type back when I was barely a teenager. Why would he want to be friends with some idiot loser (arguably even to this day) like me when he had other cool people to talk to? There isn't really any proof I've seen that he was faking his age, but it happens so frequently and often that it's probably the most likely reason as much as anything. I don't really know.

And yeah, peg me as someone who also feels like the post-Split forums were actually pretty peaceful. I'm not sure what's going on these days, but I've seen far more bickering and drama in the past than I do now. Y'all gotta have some perspective here, them 2010s were some hellish days.