GoW neighbourhood in MOUL:Again

[Trylon]

I don't know about the Gehn incident, but from my experience the Starfyre inciden boiled down to this (in pseudo-chronological order of experience):
- The old agebuilders forum was adminstrated by a woman named "Starfyre".
- After a while a man named Garrett started posting, claiming to be her husband, and that Starfire was preganant.
- Meanwhile Starfyre posted about losing job and stuff.
- Starfyre posted less and less.
- At some point in spacetime Garrett posted and told us Starfyre died in an accident along with one or two of her children.
Things really started going crazy here:
- Somehow people got organized into collecting money for funeral costs or maybe something else.
- The whole community was shocked beyond belief.
- Garret came out telling us Starfyre never really existed, but was a character he used on the Uru Wide Web, and he wanted to get away from using her. So he "killed her off" after the previous excuses about work/pregnancy/kids didn't work.
- Next thing you know, everyone has an opinion on this, varying from outrage (concentrated on the slackers forum) to understanding (mostly the agebuilders forums) to telling everyone Garrett was insane and needed to be brought into a mental institution.
- Some people with loud voices are discussing lawsuits against Garrett.
- It takes a few weeks for the dust to settle down.

Looking back it was all too ridiculous for words, but that really did happen. Quite probably this isn't anywere near the whole story, but this is what I recall of it.

[Karkadann]

wow, honesty definitely has its advantages

[Chacal]

Anyone wanting to explain these old stories to someone who joined too late to see them?

My answer would have been "Frankly, you don't want to know" but Trylon beat me to it.


I forgot to mention Cobbs, which I lurked on after Prologue closed. But there was so little traffic, and it was only understandable for mad geniuses like Dustin, Zrax, etc.

By these example, I just wanted to say that I've been part of Uru-related communities for a long time, but GoW is the one that I found comfortable.

[Trylon]

My answer would have been "Frankly, you don't want to know" but Trylon beat me to it.

Yeah, that would've probably been a better anwser
Unfortunately now I'm curious what the Gehn incident was

(Yes, I'm having a blast reminiscing about old times )

Oh, while we're at it - could anyone send me an invite to kirel or to the GoW Hood? My KI is 757541

[Aloys]

The Gehn incident.. hm. Quite a sad story, very different from the Starfyre craze but that almost killed UO for good. This is actually a pretty long story so here's a real quick summary.

Gehn was the original founder of Uru Obsession back in late 2000 when Cyan first announced Uru (then 'Mudpie'). He founded it with one of his RL friend who soon left. As Mudpie was supposed to be the next big thing Gehn was pretty ambitious about it (and was pretty open about that). He quickly got a couple people on board and together we started developping the site and the forums. And indeed UO developped well over the years.
Fast forward to summer 2007.
Uru was dead after the Ubi days and then reborn by Gametap, the community was in a bit of a shake and people at UO had been trying to expand the site in news direction to keep it alive and growing. Progress wasn't going too fast and Gehn meanwhile had been totally inactive for almost a year, he was slightly disapointed by Uru and no one had heard of him. (This wasn't the first time it happened, the UO team was pretty big so people tended to come and go.) Then one day out of the blue he reappears on the staff forum claiming that things aren't going according to his plans, that some people on the team are 'dead weight' and he wants to clear things up. Then over the next few hours he blocks the admin accounts of all those on the team that disagree with hims, start banning people left and right and quickly take technical control of the whole website and forums (being the only one left with an admin account). Ouch. Gehn 1 - UO team 0.
Unfortunately for him he forgot one little detail: he wasn't in control of the actual domain name, so we changed the UO address to point to a different server, we brought back online the site and the forums with the last back-up we had, and within a week the site and forums were back online almost unchanged.
That's most of the public story without all details of the backstage drama. Needless to say no one has heard from Gehn since.
UO has a fun history of having one big drama each summer: hackers hitting the forums, megalomaniac webmaster, hosting issues etc. Last september we were 'complaining' that we had no drama that summer and the next week our server died and we had no means to restore the site.

[D'nial]

Fast forward to summer 2007.

Eh? Is that when that happened? I don't remember it, and I was under the impression that it was all over by the time I joined in 2006.

Or am I just out of it?

[Chacal]

I think Aloys meant 2005.

[ddb174]

Those recounts jive with my own. (Though in my view, a number of the people against Gehn were far from well-behaved themselves. (I'm not referring to Aloys.)) I would like to add that for a while, there were two different Uruobsession sites because of this, which was pretty neat.

[Rainforce]

The Gehn incident.. hm. Quite a sad story, very different from the Starfyre craze but that almost killed UO for good. This is actually a pretty long story so here's a real quick summary.
[...]
Then one day out of the blue he reappears on the staff forum claiming that things aren't going according to his plans, that some people on the team are 'dead weight' and he wants to clear things up. Then over the next few hours he blocks the admin accounts of all those on the team that disagree with hims, start banning people left and right and quickly take technical control of the whole website and forums (being the only one left with an admin account). Ouch. Gehn 1 - UO team 0.[...]

wow, never heard of it. creepy. [as naive as I can be, this realy has some nightmare potential for me]
But it's interesting to see what's attached to a simple game franchise with a powerful fan base.

[diafero]

Wow... Uru definitely has more than enough stories (stuff happening in the community, not the IC story) to fill at least one huge book. Absolutely crazy. Thank you very much, I actually expected no more than the answer Chacal provided

Last september we were 'complaining' that we had no drama that summer and the next week our server died and we had no means to restore the site.

So does that mean the whole data stored in the site, like all the walkthroughs and whatnot, is lost....?