Difference between revisions of "Sonic CulT"
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Revision as of 03:09, 4 October 2007
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This article needs cleanup. This article needs to be edited to conform to a higher standard of article quality. |
Sonic CulT is a large information repository started by PACHUKA in February of 1999. It was inspired by Simon Wai and his discovery of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Beta. Ever since then it has become known as one of, if not the, largest information repositories for Sonic the Hedgehog in the community. It is currently run by Sazpaimon, who also runs the CulT side project X-CulT.
Contents
Early Days
PACHUKA first emerged in the emulation group as head of EmuCult, which challenged the status quo of then-prominent emulation sites such as Overclocked and Zophar's Domain by ridiculing and mocking them. This aggrandizing, in-your-face style In his spare time, Pach set up several small sites on the CultChyldren, including one called simply "Sonic CulT," stylized with a capitalized T due to the emerald in its logo. The CulT was basically a gathering of information PACHUKA had found via Game Genie codes (around this time, he published an early Sonic 2 hack, Twiztid Sonic 2, which had basic palette/text/playlist changes) and the earliest pieces of the research scene—information on the Wai Sonic 2 Beta and magazine scans.
PACHUKA vs. Saxman
As Sonic CulT began to grow, in 2000, Andy Wolan of the Sonic Stuff Research Group attempted to join the two together. This failed due to the SSRG's hosting on ZTNet, which also hosts sites such as Emulation Camp and Zophar's Domain, both of which had been hacked by PACHUKA in the past during the time EmuCult was open. The SSRG's host refused to host them, and PACHUKA was given access to the news script for the SSRG as a consolation. A few weeks later, the news script was hacked by someone who then began to post offensive content. Andy blamed PACHUKA, as he believed the IP's matched, and publicly lashed out at him on the main page of the SSRG. This was later disproven due to the fact that PACHUKA and the hacker had both used AOL at the time, an Internet Service Provider who's clients do not have static IP Addresses. PACHUKA was proven innocent, yet Andy did not apologize, instead claiming that Saxman wrote the news article and to ask him for an apology. Saxman refused to give PACHUKA an apology, which sparked a 2 year feud between Saxman and PACHUKA.
DUST HILL IS FAKE
After a four-month stint in jail in mid-2001, PACHUKA returned to the scene, posting "DUST HILL IS FAKE" to Area 51. Due to the Desert level picture and the first series of interviews with Brenda Ross, it was widely believed in the Sonic research community that Dust Hill Zone was in fact the Desert Level. Though he had calmly and logically explained his justifications, the posters at Area 51 attacked him and bickered amongst themselves for more than 20 pages before Stealth closed the topic and forbade further discussion on the matter.
PACHUKA retaliated in what would become his signature style—by causing tension among others, causing him to be flamed and for other people to go at each other. In the midst of all of this, Friend of Sonic (FoS) had something to post. He was warned not to do it again or he'd be banned. He started arguing with Stealth, and Stealth got bandwagoned by a vast group of people. Stealth, at the time co-owner of SSRG, wiped the messageboards completely and left a message about how everyone was stupid and ignorant.
During this time, the Sonic CulT Ikonboard first emerged, and though many people were familiar with the site, few visited the forums. However, the instability of Area 51 and the SSRG in the months following(forum switches, Area 51 being shut down due to "software piracy," etc.) led to a boon in traffic, where former members of Area 51 migrated to the CulT. In this time, the IRC Channel #area51 on Mirkknet became popular amongst forumgoers, which helped establish the true social order of the CulT, despite not being an affiliated channel. IRCops dosdemon and lord joined Sonic CulT and members who would later become Admins or Posse (Grap3, Ryoga, Beta, etc.) were among the most active and often opped.
Sonic CulT vs. SSRG
Andy's hatred of PACHUKA began in 2002 when Andy shut down Saxman's site, due to arguments between the two. Saxman asked to have his work removed from the SSRG, and Andy refused, removing his entire site. Since Saxman and PACHUKA had recently made up, PACHUKA posted news about it on the front page of his website. This infuriated Andy, who proceeded to say many harsh things in an IM conversation to PACHUKA [1]. PACHUKA began to publicly retaliate against Andy, in hopes of helping Saxman get his site back, resulting in a major flamewar, and ending with PACHUKA getting banned from the popular forum at the time, Area 51.
Saxman never got his site back from Andy, so PACHUKA offered to host it. He purchased the domain and hosted it on the server Emucult was hosted on. Saxman tried to reason with Andy on the SSRG's forums, however all of his posts were deleted. Later that year, GerbilSoft and Ultima were banned from the SSRG, because both expressed interest in joining Saxman's new hacking community, SHaCNet. Eventually, Andy claimed that SSRG is dead, and began posting Anti-PACHUKA and anti-Saxman articles on his site. Saxman attempted to make a truce with Andy, who demanded that Saxman take down the history page on his site. Saxman did not wish to do this, but offered to edit out any negative comments towards Andy or the SSRG. Andy declined the offer and insited that the history page had to be removed completely. Exhausted, Saxman gave up the truce:
Well it's official -- the truce is off. He's going to update his stupid little "Saxman" page to include the e-mails and probably a bunch more lies. I'm so SICK and TIRED of this. I just want it to end.... but I refuse to change my site in unfair ways just to end it. It he doesn't like my generous offer of modifying that Story page and all, that's his problem. He can whine all he wants. It'll end when people who support him realize that "hey, this guy won't let this thing die." It might take the longest time, but it'll happen sooner or later. Well, let's keep a watch for an exciting new update to the Saxman page shall we?! =D
--Saxman
The Fall of SSRG
Pachuka was later banned on the Sonic Secrets Center, but this proved to be a misunderstanding and the ban was lifted. [2]. When Andy found out about this he asked Digital Xeron, the administrator who unbanned him, to reinstate the ban once more. Xeron put up almost no resistance to Andy's complaints and banned PACHUKA within minutes. [3]
Soon thereafter, Andy announced his retirement from SSRG. He gave ownership of the site to Chaos. Chaos, better with PACHUKA than Andy had, and the two managed to form a 'peace treaty'. A topic called 'ENOUGH' was posted on CulT and SSRG, showing to everyone that there would be peace between the two sites. An infuriated Andy Wolan stormed back onto the scene and banned PACHUKA from the SSRG. PACHUKA took down Sonic CulT in protest and refused to bring it back up until Andy agreed for peace. Instead, Andy replaced the whole of SSRG with a simple page declaring its death. Three days after the incident, Jan Abaza called it quits, and told everyone that he is gonna terminate the Area 51 community for good. He did so, and pretty much everyone moved to either Sonic 2 Beta or the Sonic Cult community forums.
Rise to Power
When SSRG closed down, Sonic CulT took the spot as the largest Sonic research site in the community. Many of SSRG's previous members either migrated to Sonic CulT, or other smaller sites such as Sonic Classic. During this time, the CulT moved to its current .org domain, established a #cult channel on Mirkknet and set up an Invision Board which became quite popular.
Pachuka returns to Sonic Classic (that recently moved to Ikonboard) and posts normal stuff, probably offensive but everyone ignores it. He creates some tension between the mods and him, and claims to have logs of LocalH speaking against Pach in many ways. He posts them but everyone denies them to be true. He then posts a longass thread that summarizes his stay at Sonic Classic, which follows to LocalH apologizing to Pach, and then Pach apologizing to the SClassic staff. In spite of this fence-mending, a lasting dislike of the two communities towards each other would still linger for for four more years.
Time goes, Pach pisses off Moogle Cavern (TMC), TMC replies with a rule saying that their members shouldn't mention the name PACHUKA or Sonic Cult. Everything calms down, then Grap3fruitman posts on TMC that Pach has a beta of Sonic Mega Collection. No one believes him, Pach posts screenshots of the beta, he still gets flamed for some reason. Case ends here. During the Spring of 2003, Sonic Cult community forums is flooded by newbies.
In approximately May of 2003, Pach shuts down the Sonic Cult boards for saying he doesn't have passion for the site anymore, and because of anyone bitching about the dictatorship. A week later, he restores the boards with a new name (SCARAD) and a new government style: Democracy. There's a new forum named "Community Forum" that you can add polls in there and vote who should get kicked out and who should get family/posse/admin, etc. It didn't work well, so Pach decided to shut the boards down again, only to get a fresh new messageboard called SCARZ (in honor of Sonic Tsunami, and his SCARRRRRRRRRRZ) running under dictatorship yet again.
#cult moved on to AJ's Phasedisruptor ircd (which was originally created for injoke channel #nazis) in October 2003 due to Mirkknet's merger with Foxchat. When this happened, dosdemon was no longer an IRCop and aliases were limited to eight characters.
Greenegg
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This short section needs expansion. You can help Sonic Retro by adding to it. |
Many members, PACHUKA included, weren't pleased with how the site was laid out. All pages were static HTML, and very disorganized. PACHUKA concluded that the site needed an entirely new CMS. Goomba was given license to create this new system, which came to be known as Greenegg. Upon completion, it was uploaded to the server, and PACHUKA shut down the site's main page while he rebuilt it. It's still being used by the site today. Greenegg is a MySQL-based CMS, and wound up being far better organized than the original static webpages. However, the system is showing its age, and closer inspection shows that it was very poorly written. The current owner of the site, Sazpaimon, has given the task of rewriting Sonic CulT's CMS to drx.
Recent years
Between 2004 to present, Sonic CulT has had several changes.
CulT Buyout and Ownership Change
In mid-2004, PACHUKA announced that he was no longer interested in running his website, and decided to sell it to the highest bidder. Many CulT members put up funds to buy the CulT, totaling $850. Member Tigress fronted the money, and was later paid back by others who had promised to pay. The consensus was that the member Sazpaimon, and at the time maintainer, would be appointed as head of operations of the website. On August 18th, 2004, PACHUKA gave the team temporary hosting on his current server, which ended up being a bad decision, as the host was asking for sums totaling $200 per month, whereas PACHUKA received free hosting. Soon after, Tigress gave her share of the site to InsaneSonikkuFan, her boyfriend at the time.
Many members of the site voiced their general displeasure of the ownership change, calling the site "TCR CulT," and became the source of frequent hackings, many of them by actual forum members. Soon after the ownership change the hosting was cut short for unknown reasons - the site was taken offline without any form of a backup. A strategy for bringing the site back up was established, and on October 3rd the site was back online. Unfortunately, the team could not come up with the money to receive hosting for the month of December, and as a result of this and the general displeasure with the site's status, Sazpaimon decided to shut the site down, but not before being contacted by PACHUKA.
PACHUKA had noticed the team's difficulty with maintaining the site, and offered his hand in helping them. PACHUKA's plan was to pretend that he was returning to the site as owner, while Sazpaimon could do as he pleases with the site. As a result, Sazpaimon would receive free hosting from the server administrator on the basis that the admin would think the site was still PACHUKA's. Sazpaimon agreed, and informed InsaneSonikkuFan of Pachuka's plan. ISF did not trust Pachuka, believing that Pachuka had some devious trick up his sleeve. He'd asked for a signed and written statement from PACHUKA - a contract. Sazpaimon contacted PACHUKA about this, who did not understand why ISF was needed in the first place, as Sazpaimon owned the sonic-cult.org domain, and was the one in charge. Realizing this, Sazpaimon dismissed ISF and gave the domain to PACHUKA for him to use as proof to his host that he ran the site again.
This would end up being short lived, as PACHUKA would end up being arrested in late December due to molestation charges. The site was taken offline by a friend of his with no way of bringing it back. A temporary forum backup was put into place, however, the main site would be offline until February of 2005, when Sazpaimon stepped up and used his backup to restore the site under the domain name "sonic-cult.net," Where it would reside until later that year.
The Slow Return of the CulT
During 2005, the site saw numerous server changes due to problems with different hosts. In February, the site was hosted on a friend of Sazpaimon's server for a very low price. Random outages prevented the server from being online at normal times, and a few months later the entire server would go offline and, due to issues between Sazpaimon and his host, the site ended up getting removed from the server before getting a chance to back it up.
Shortly afterward, Sazpaimon received hosting from a member named Dark, a friend of Tweaker's. The CulT would reside on this server for a number of months before it was decided that it was not adequate enough to host a site as large as the CulT. The site was moved onto a more powerful server, however this was short lived when the server was DDOSed, and as a result the CulT was kicked off of the network.
Later that year, Sazpaimon had managed to get into PACHUKA's domain adminstrator account and recover the sonic-cult.org domain, as well as PACHUKA's other side-project domain, anti-otaku.com, mere weeks before the domains would have expired.
The CulT now owns a dedicated server which is used to host a number of community sites, including The Sonic 2 Beta Page, Hacking CulT, Hidden Palace, and NiGHTSintoDREAMS.com. Since then, the site has since regained its spot and popularity in the Sonic Community. Though PACHUKA has been released from prison, he has no interest in maintaining the site anymore, though him and Sazpaimon still keep in close contact.