since it's been a circulating topic of discussion the last few weeks, my removal from NFSCars, I thought it would be useful to point out some facts.
as of late it seems that even the NFSCars faithful are starting to realize it's an overall losing battle. I would like to reflect on last year's happenings first, with the dismissal of Greger as site administrator. at this point I was a "moderator" (the site software actually treats all roles the same, strangely), and had no idea how the site software worked. Azrael had some availability and knowledge to share, so I appointed him to administrator. other people began volunteering to help out with moderation tasks like approving uploads and moderating showrooms and whatever else the kids are into these days. as far as I could tell, this little system I engineered was working.
the site, however, was not. after various measures we'd taken to curbing the massive influx of fake (bot) accounts registering, and trying to come up with a solution for getting the Forums active again, it was ultimately decided that all of these problems would persist and would be impossible to correct without updating the site software.
amidst Greger's firing and subsequent tantrums about Mike Geise is the worst person on the planet, I would like to point out that I always defended Geise by saying there could just as easily be no NFSCars at all. I don't remember the context of why the Greger thing happened, it's irrelevant. what matters is we managed to squeeze another year of life out of NFSCars.
back to pointing out facts: I knew how to remove bot accounts and tried changing Forum settings. I knew how to appoint people to superuser status. I knew how to ban people if necessary. what I did NOT know how to do was make news posts, edit thumbnails, or impersonate users in the shoutbox. I did rib a lot of people in the shoutbox, and then afterwards peace would be made and then they would be on our side. that's been a staple of mine for a very long time now.
so I can understand at pure face value going on the site and seeing F-body Faction banners posted everywhere that there would be some assumption I had something to do with it. I didn't. so whether my account was deleted or the password was changed (sidenote: the lost password script is broken, attention) is irrelevant to me. I have no desire to go back to NFSCars. for at least the last 9 years I've been accused of many things there that I wasn't even present to do, or have outright had credit for positive actions I've brought about stripped from me. it has been a great 18 year run there (well, honestly, only about 5 of those years were actually notable) but it's time to move on.
any future mods that I release will be NFSAddons exclusives, until inevitably they're probably stolen by people for GTA mods or whatever people are into now.
I would like to extend thanks to all the volunteers that worked with us in keeping their machine turning, but like I said, it's time to move on.