When did DDO die?

I believe it is safe to say it is dead. Much like how finding a corpse which no longer resembles whom it had been after being largely consumed by cats, that person is indeed dead... But time of death? For DDO I am estimating sometime in 2017, but without a change log for their site (the update that removed debates being able to end?) it's a bit hard to narrow down.

For that matter, time of life? I believe the site came alive November 2008, as that is the oldest post which hasn't had necrophiliacs have a go at it.

Anyway, I've decided to polish up that guide a wrote for it a final time, and have a brief farewell message to a site which at one time had been so good to so many of us.

When I got banned it unironically decayed perpetually into the abyss it's in now. Up to my official ban, it was growing over time. Not narcissism, rather truth about a mod who punished eccentrics and later turned into the polar opposite; an absentee father to the site altogether.

But then, wouldn't anybody feel "when I left" was the moment it died for them.  What are some objective criteria for declaring a website dead?  Fewer than X visits per x time?  Mentions on social media? Priority on google?  There's probably somebody on here who knows that stuff for DDO and there's probably some industry standard we might find.

Is there a tool that tracks historical website availability?

Was there a particularly memorable outage in 2017?  That might make a good marker.

Last time Roy Latham logged on was 11 months ago.  That's a pretty good marker.

I don't feel it, I have analysed it.

It was slow, gradual and snowballed around late 2015.

I was banned end of 2012.

I got to have a debate with Roy over Facebook... I was left unimpressed to say the least.

The site's official death(where it actually died vs long suffering) was 2018. In 2017, it was on life support, or even suffering majorly. Even in 2017, there was some signs of life because were active. In 2018 is where the death happened officially. That is when they died. 

Deterioration is not the same as death 

I never debated him and I never agreed with him much. But my impression was that there was a time in classic DDO when Latham was a bit of a mascot.  One thing everybody seemed to agree on was Roy's skill.  I was trying to think of a narrative hook that reflected the fortunes of DDO and thought aobut Roy.

Roy was the single most active voter. For that alone I will always hold some fondness toward him.

I don't count Weekend At Bernie's II level shanahans to be living...

Anyway, what event in 2018 would you say killed it?

Think I found it. July 2016! They updated the code in such a way that disabled forfeited debates being able to end (and then decided it was too wonderful of a change to ever reverse): https://www.debate.org/forums/debate.org/topic/82207/2#2511128

We stayed in denial a long time, hoping it was temporary. But denial is just the first stage of grief... There were certainly other wounds, but that one is highly comparable to cardiac arrest.

Issues with debates did not (in my opinion) kill the site once and for all since a vast majority of people who were still on the site were not even interested in voting on debates, let alone want to do debates themselves. Even though it was called 'debate'.org, the forums was the lifeblood of the site, as it is on here as far as I can tell. Once the spambots started to literally flood the forums with spam, to the point that Airmax had to create stickied threads like damn lifeboats in a literal sea of spam, thats when the site truly died. 

There was shit going wrong before we hit that point sure. Polls and Opinions were unusable, spambots were well around well before the spam grew out of control, and of course Juggle didnt give a single shit about managing the site, but the inability to use the forums is what truly did DDO in. 

Wow, you finally wrote something worthwhile, Daniel.

See what you can do when you're not busy with cringey, immature trolling?

*rousing applause*

Are you Ragnar Rahl?

No he is Ragnar Lothbrok and I am Ivar the Boneless.

That's fixed now.  Forfeited debates can end.  There are still other problems though.

I had ceased using the site before the spam got that bad, but I do remember a few months ago glancing to see that island site had flooded 6 pages of the main forum with their pity bait.

Of course to Juggle as long as spam-bots fake site activity, it will continue to be alive in their ledger.

I was literally staring at one of them 20 minutes ago.

Once the mass spam-attacks hit every forum of the site, thats when the site really had a get-together to discuss which site to move over to. There was a 20-80 split between moving to debateIsland or everyone going their separate ways, then this site popped into existence and a majority immigrated over here. 

I wonder how many more members we might have here now if that final spam-wave hit 6 months or a year earlier. A LOT of good posters had drifted off the site prior to that point who might have transitioned here once the spam hit, which could have livened things up a bit more. 

How strange to randomly attempt to guess my name like that, Daniel Bench.

Nevertheless, I've been fantastic. How has your dad been? I heard he's been a bit slow recently.

Not really a guess since you so basically gave it to me yourself when telling me about your time at Macquarie University during your Bachelors degree in education 

Also he's doing pretty well, thanks so much for asking! He's about the same as your friend you use to tell me about, though the key difference being that he's not an utter coward and all. 

^ If I was head mod this would never happen.

That's so strange. I have no recollection of giving out my full name. You must be an absolute genius, if you think you'd be able to guess my name, based on that. No doubt you are a genius, given your penchant for wasting your life with videogames, enjoying a cartoon designed for little girls, and getting banned over 8 times due to same mistake. I'm honestly surprised your name isn't Daniel Einstein.

My pleasure to ask. I was really worried that he was struggling with the shame of having a complete failure of a son whom is 26, hasn't achieved anything in his life, and still unironically enjoys Frozen (I'm sure it's one of your brothers). It's great to read that he's doing "pretty well" (which I assume means he pulled through), because it would be an absolute tragedy if the shame was too much for him and he took the easy way out. No doubt he's still fighting :)

Oh don't worry sweetie it doesn't surprise me that you don't remember that, it all went down such a long time ago that any competent person would have simply put it all behind them and moved on with their lives rather then try to dig it up all over again out of nowhere just to pick a fight..... It was around that period of time after you said in the main forum you found me attractive, but before that time in a PM when you admitted that you were wrong to have protested the Weekly Stupid since some people need to be called out on their stupidity.  

I do miss these little chats we would have, but its almost 11pm where I'm at right now and I have to help someone move tomorrow morning. Tell you what, just reach out to me in a PM if you wanna discuss anything..... It'll be just like those old times, but hopefully without the 'screaming at me in all caps' and 'punching your laptop screen because you have poor control over your emotions' and all that mayhem. 

Tootles! <3

Oh right, I forgot that I'm not competent. Could you teach me how to be that? I really want to make a movie, of which probably took dozens of hours to produce, only to have no one care about it. But yeah I do remember that time. I remember being suicidal, depressed out of my mind and having uncontrollable emotions. No wonder I regretted protesting the Weekly Stupid, and, even worse, actually being attracted to you. Just goes to show that I hit rock-bottom.

Aww that's a shame :(  I was loving our friendly, nostalgic chat, but I guess it's better if you pretend to have things to do. That way, you won't feel like you've wasted 8 of your adult years stuck in adolescence, endeavouring in a litany of useless achievements on DDO and irl. After all, we want the best for you, Benchy :)  I'll make sure to PM you so you can hide all of the nasty things you say to me from everyone, just like you used to do (and by "nasty" I mean witty banter. And by "hide" I mean uphold a healthy respect for privacy).

I look forward to hearing from you <3

The flood spam of bots

I'm going to stick with my cats eating a corpse analogy. ... Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the sight of it scared away most of the remaining mourners.

You hit the nail on the head. The spam is counted as traffic. Juggle then shows it to advertisers and advertisers say, wow look at all that traffic and buy ads from Juggle. From Juggles perspective, all that spam is advertising $$. I've said all along that DDO is a tax write off. I remember back in the day people putting links up saying DDO was worth $750,000, I just laughed. Juggle is a consortium of many websites. 

The FF glitch did not kill DDO. DDO was dying before hand. Imagine if a 60 year old man got syphilis, a broken leg and soon after cancer. That is DDO.