@Mallow asked in NerrChat what the deal was with all the spam at the end of NERR 3.0. I looked back into it to try to come up with a reply and quickly realized this deserves its own thread, so here we go. Beware this discusses some unsavory topics.
Digibutter has never been a stranger to spammers, but towards the end of NERR 3.0 (mid 2023-early 2024), we got raided for the first time in modern digibutter history. Now, it wasn’t the absolute end of the world, but it was pretty cragging bad at its worst. @ambient and @LiquidHerr can attest to this.
Sometime around, but likely before, August 2023, a user by the name of PizzaRollJunkie joined the site. He would end up using this name alongside other aliases such as Unkie Seth, TotalFreedomHater, and others. Now, I can’t see what his first message was due to 3.0 being down and the fact that afterwards, most of his messages were deleted, but I remember it being something along the lines of [Help me raid this Minecraft server called TotalFreedom or else I’ll raid your website]. We (all like 3 of us who used 3.0) did not take him up on his offer, so shortly after, he began spamming various vulgar messages and disturbing images and just wouldn’t leave us alone.
We had thought that he would go away after a while like most spammers usually do, but he kept at it for months! Franis wasn’t really present on the site at the time (sadly but understandably so), so we tried ignoring him. That didn’t work, so I then made NerrBot automatically dislike his posts and reply with a message indicating that the above post was spam, but this kind of just fed the flames. After some time, Franis noticed and blocked PRJ from posting in #all-posts. This was a small improvement, but he was still spamming in The Dump and NerrChat alongside spamming with various alt accounts.
PRJ really must have hated us for some reason because he eventually organized a raid on digibutter. He made a post on /b/ on 4chan and another on the raid board on the then new soyjak.party. I found them, and I think I may have taken screenshots, but those are probably lost to time (or at least not on this device). He said something along the lines of we’re all bad people and you should raid digibutter, and while the response on 4chan was mostly the classic “/b/ is not your personal army,” the denizens of soyjak.party were mindless enough to actually raid us until they got bored in a few days and Franis disabled new user signups. A lot of the spam was deleted, but you can still see some under the history of the latest user signups on 3.0, however, again, the site is down, so not much use at the moment.
Miscellaneous Details:
- PRJ’s main avatar was a MegaMan head, though on his alt accounts, he sometimes copied user avatars and attempted to impersonate other users. On NERR 3.0, there weren’t really any safeguards against this aside from checking post history.
- FWIW, the default avatar in the old Bitlands browser game is Mega Man. Does this imply PRJ was referencing this? Probably not.
- PRJ sometimes linked YouTube videos from a channel which he claimed was his. This was never verified, but the channel (which is hopefully banned by now) consisted of many short vlogs of a clearly mentally-ill, older man where he claimed to be a schizophrenic pedophile and ranted about various topics.
- PRJ has come back here a couple of times to post on 4.0. The post history has been deleted, but it’s nothing you would want to see. You can look through the user list and see which users are banned from trying to visit their profile. One of the accounts was named something like @shadoos_alt.
- We wondered at one point if this was the return of an old troll from digibutter 1.x–early 3.0, MeowMixer, but the consensus was probably not.
Retrospective:
None of us know why PRJ raided us. He felt too persistent to think he was just doing it for the love of the game. Mental illness likely played its part. What we do know is that he had something against a Minecraft server by the name of Total Freedom, and for some reason, he then came after us. Maybe one or more people playing on Total Freedom were old members of digibutter? This leads me into concluding with new information I’ve just discovered looking back into this…
I did some research on Total Freedom’s history. It was a historical Minecraft server created in 2010 that at its peak seemingly had a pretty large playerbase. It was an anarchy server like 2b2t. The name of the server owner was Seth. It would seem that by 2017, the community was dying and what players remained had unhealthy fixations with the server and were displaying degenerate behavior. Seth wanted to shut down the server, but ownership was instead transferred to one of the admins, and the server stayed online. By 2023, the remaining community was so toxic and rampant with “debauchery and pedophilia” that some of the older users organized raids against the Minecraft server and their forums as a form of protest. On August 17, 2023, a group of German trolls succesfully executed a network hack which led to the shutdown of the Minecraft server. There was one more revival in the form of a new Minecraft server in 2024, but it doesn’t look to have lasted long. Now, the forums are all that still remain with new user registrations disabled.
Here is my source for the above paragraph. It explains this in more detail than I did: The Total Freedom story | murgleis.com. The Total Freedom forums can be found here: Forum list | TotalFreedom: Rebooted. There seemingly used to be a wiki too that was taken down.
My final thoughts:
This was such a disgusting mess that we got roped into despite having seemingly no connection to all this drama. I’m glad we got NERR 4.0 out of it at least. Like I mentioned above, I do wonder if the reason may have been that old digibutter members had gotten involved with Total Freedom. I have heard from talking with some of the old members when they’ve visited that some of the old (NERR 1.x) members went on to have problems with drug addictions, accusations of pedophilia, and various other things, so there is a chance that there’s some sort of correlation there. Otherwise, who knows. I guess he also could have just found out about us from somewhere else on the Internet and decided to just be a troll.
TL;DR: Some users who leave digibutter go on to have major problems with their life. Solution: Don’t leave digibutter :D
Pic below of an example spam post.
