Closing down the forums [update]

[Admin]

Hi all,
Unfortunately I can no longer maintain this website due to a certain Chinese spammer who has been harassing me for the past 4 years going to lengths to find my home address, phone number etc. This all stemmed from a copyright claim to the game "Dark Blade" which is a Chinese knock off version of Blade of Darkness, which in itself was abandonware at the time. Basically the Chinese spammer stole mods from members of this site and included them into his version of the game which he is selling in China then claimed copyright against the original mod creators. He also demanded that the members who created the mods be deleted from this site and the BOD forums shut down. I refused and then got continually harassed.

Fast forward a couple of years and the rights to Blade of Darkness was picked up by a British company SNEG who "Mr China Man" believes I work for and this site is a massive conspiracy to defraud him and his company. He demanded it be removed from steam and despite explaining I have nothing to do with the game and this is a Drakan fan site not BOD, harassment continued including legal threats and official paperwork from courts in China. Seem as these were all in Chinese and sent to a UK address I could not take them seriously. Nothing ever came of it and I made all attempts to block "Mr China Man" but he relentlessly keep tracking me down. I sought help from Codemasters who originally published the game and they were quite helpful and said basically I have nothing to worry about legally. But "Mr China Man" persisted. Without going into too much detail this, along with personal IRL issues I can no longer run the site as it is.

This along with repeated hacking attempts and spam registrations from Chinese IP addresses (which may or may not be related to him) has broke the straw on the camel's back. I came home to hundreds of emails sent from the web server about blocked IP addresses from users who have tried to brute force the admin and moderator account passwords.

I have disabled registrations on the forums and they will be placed into read only mode at the end of the year. To the members of the Blade of Darkness forums this gives you plenty of time to set up another forum elsewhere and archive some of the posts. Unfortunately I can't send a partial copy of the database files and due to GDPR rules I can't send a copy of the whole database either. After that all of the forums will be archived somehow - I don't know yet but Ill get to that later.

So if you want to keep anything from this forum please do so BEFORE 31st of December 2023.

For Drakan fans the discussion has been moved to our discord server which you can join by following this link. https://discord.gg/nCMrU4p

I know this site has been going for 22 years and as much as I hate to admit it, I think it's time to put it to bed. However at this time it is limited to the forums only. The main website will continue for now but I will ditch the mirrored domain, Arokhslair.com as that is not used.

Thanks for all your support over the years.

Adrian

[LeadHead]

I had a feeling this was coming but remained hopeful. Many old gaming forums have been since lost to time. It's sad to hear, but I can understand the decision.

I'll try to sift through the content posted and somehow back up the most interesting parts.

Thank you for providing us BoD'ers a home for all these years.

[Admin]

Another update to the Wang kai saga. Now the attacks have started on my personal website which I think is too much of a coincidence. All Chinese IP addresses or IP addresses associated with a VPN.

I've looked through the past emails from Wang and complaining of links in the forums pointing to illegal content that belongs to him. The said links are posted by creators of BOD mods to where they can be downloaded from. At this point what I might do instead of making the BoD forums read only is instead make them members only. So unless you have an account you can't read or post there.

What do you guys think?

[Harrison]

OK, let it be at least this way rather than nothing.

[cieply]

As you are closing it it would be good to inform everyone about that. I just checked an email and, to my surprise, I discovered that I did not get any email about closing down. It would be good to send automatic email to everyone about that as some may not visit the forum too often but they may read email.

[Admin]

After second thoughts and a lengthy discussion on the Drakan Discord server I decided to keep the website going for now but with some changes. I'm only closing the BoD forums - the rest, no new members can register but existing members can still post.

The BoD forums will be made read only after the end of the year. It's to stop a long standing argument and I don't need the hassle over it to be honest hence why they are closing. The argument is only about the Blade of Darkness hence why the Drakan parts will be staying. The BoD forums are done as a favour for the community which I am no part of anymore and having to deal with legal issues over a game that isn't the subject of this website is not something I'm willing to do anymore.

As for emailing everyone, a lot don't like that and it's not possible to separate BoD and Drakan fans. I will send an email out though nearer the time as a reminder.

[Melber]

I really amazed what kind of individuum live among us on the planet.

[UCyborg]

Ugh, people really are insufferable. I suppose locking the forum down was the best that could be done, given the circumstances. Shame, but it is what it is I guess.

[Admin]

It's not very active anyway and as you know we are all on Discord now. However Discord isn't web searchable and things can get lost in conversation where the forum is an easier way to find information that has been asked before.

It's really the BoD forums that are the problem but the forum registration setting is site wide.

[UCyborg]

I keep hearing word "Discord" being thrown around. Honestly, I just don't see the appeal personally. In all these "modern" chat "apps". Not something I'd want to run out and make an account for, enough services already have my data as it is.

That and I despise Electron based apps / web clients that are huge bloated blob of JavaScript requiring recent Chromium and shitload of resources to work right. Bleh... Read someplace there's a Pidgin plugin for it, but still, doesn't seem worth it to me. I probably wouldn't use it much anyway, there's only one forum left where I'm still kinda active and even that is more for passing time than meaningful discussions, LOL.

Guess I'm old school in my software preferences.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/25/i ... ting-worse

[yangez93]

I keep hearing word "Discord" being thrown around. Honestly, I just don't see the appeal personally. In all these "modern" chat "apps". Not something I'd want to run out and make an account for, enough services already have my data as it is.

That and I despise Electron based apps / web clients that are huge bloated blob of JavaScript requiring recent Chromium and shitload of resources to work right. Bleh... Read someplace there's a Pidgin plugin for it, but still, doesn't seem worth it to me. I probably wouldn't use it much anyway, there's only one forum left where I'm still kinda active and even that is more for passing time than meaningful discussions, LOL.

Guess I'm old school in my software preferences.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/25/i ... ting-worse

Good to see you UCyborg

I also prefer the Drakan forum as Arokh's Lair where it is just a public forum and without an account you can explore topics. Unfortunately recently there wasn't much activity here so I try to post some stuff on Discord. I have a question for you, do you still have plans to develop AiO Patch further? Unfortunately I have some problems with installing Drakan on Win11 so I have to use my older PC to play it, I definitely will be happy to see newer patches.

[UCyborg]

I wouldn't talk about it in the terms of plans. AiO patch is something that I'd like to re-visit some day, but somehow I never get around to it. Or if I do, something else distracts me. I have that problem with other things as well.

AFAIK, installing issues with Drakan and other games using InstallShield have been documented and there's nothing really new regarding the workarounds that should still apply to Win11. The only new thing seems to be that Microsoft managed to break DirectMusic further, or so it seems, it's interesting that it only prevents playback of certain in-game music tracks, though a DLL swap can fix that. No idea if there's a workaround that could be implemented on game's side.

I still use old PC from 2009 with a graphics card from 2014. Since I don't game as much as I used to, even this old thing is not being utilized as much as it could be. I did upgrade RAM from 4 GB to 6 GB last year, the cheap Kingston looks a bit odd next to the pricier Mushkin modules, but that's what I got getting around to getting more RAM after so many years. I don't usually take my chances with used parts market, but since I stumbled upon a computer shop that also takes used parts and sells them and they happened to have one DDR2 module, I gave it a go and ordered it. It's nice to have some extra breathing space.