darkSpyro

The body landed on my table rotted to the core. The victim? At one point, arguably the biggest forum for fans of Spyro the Dragon and the Skylanders franchise. Today, it lies on my autopsy table, with dozens of holes, signs of blunt force trauma, and a deep rot, not to mention the stench. At one time, this corpse of a forum had a peak day of 1322 users online, and had over 15,000 registered users. Now? It’s dead, save for a few festering bacteria that like to think it’s still alive and healthy.

I pick up my cold steel scalpel, its sharp edge slicing into decomposed flesh. It’s about time I found out:

What killed darkSpyro?

The Spyro and Skylanders Series

Let’s get the most obvious factors out of the way, and that’s the games themselves. darkSpyro.net started back in May 2005, seven years after a certain purple dragon debuted on the PlayStation, and six months before the Nintendo DS entry, Spyro: Shadow Legacy. After a string of fairly solid games, it seemed Spyro fever just couldn’t be cured.

The series was forged by Insomniac Games and published by Sony themselves, becoming a mascot for the platform rivaled only by a certain orange bandicoot, until the year 2000, when both IPs were purchased by Vivendi Universal. This started what’s largely considered somewhat of a dark era for the purple dragon, as nothing really hit the same highs of the first games under Insomniac and Sony. When dark52 (also test52 and Alex) created the site, Spyro was still deep into the “classic” era many fans know and love. Little did he know, many tumultuous reboots were on the way. And with reboots comes site traffic.

In 2006, Spyro got his own reboot, as was the style at the time. More mature and edgy than the classic series, but not to the level of something like Bomberman X or Bionic Commando. The series aimed to be a fantasy epic, and likely riding the coattails of the Lord of the Rings, hired Elijah Wood as Spyro, and employed other heavy hitters like David Spade, Cree Summers, and Gary Oldman. This new reboot was divisive among many fans, but brought new users in droves.

In 2011, Spyro got another reboot, albeit one almost in name only, with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. Although this new pug-nosed Spyro (who has a very divisive design but I personally adore) came with the starter pack, he wasn’t actually the main character, and got less and less screen time as the series went on. However, Skylanders wasn’t just another video game, as it arguably kickstarted the toys to life craze of the 2010s, before the series’ death in 2016. However, it was with Skylanders that the site found arguably its biggest audience. With everything from news and figure releases being discovered by the users of the Skylanders forums, darkSpyro was a treasure trove for news of the series for half a decade.

Finally, after Skylanders fell into obscurity 2 years prior, Spyro got one more reboot: the Reignited Trilogy. This remake of the first three Insomniac games from the 90s followed in the footsteps of his bandicoot brother’s own remakes with the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. Reignited introduced a whole new generation to earlier Spyro games on modern hardware, but as they were remakes of three previous games, there was little to discover or theorize about, aside from a possible new installment, similar to Crash’s treatment with Crash 4: It’s About Time. Just like Crash, Spyro the Dragon is currently a property of Activision Blizzard, which has been having its own issues and controversy, but with the recent purchase of Actiblizz by Microsoft under their Xbox brand, we may see a brand new installment featuring the purple dragon in the future. However, only time will tell when that comes to fruition.

Daddy Issues

Long ago, darkSpyro had a single man to dish out punishment. He was judge, jury, and executioner.

He was dark52.

To my knowledge, little is known about dark52. A man who has earned a drink named after him, a legend on these forums. He loves his April Fool’s pranks, he’s a Futurama fan, a Brit who loves a little purple dragon. That’s about all the average user knows about him. Once upon a time, he was a very active user, and his word was law. The one and only Spyro the Admin was all that stood between the forum and chaos, until a series of incidents outside of his timezone made a huge shift in the forum’s power balance necessary. That day, the Hunters were born.

Hunters have a lot of power on the site, and there’s typically one or two of them for every given board. They can issue temp bans, give out moderated messages, edit other posts, close and edit topics, and even have their own super secret forum. However, final say on permanent bans and any other huge decisions are decided by dark himself. The problem is dark52 isn’t around much anymore.

Does he have a family? A big, important job? Is he dead in a gutter? No one really knows, but at times, with lack of change and accountability on his part, it truly feels like he’s largely abandoned the site.

The Fall of Forums

darkSpyro.net is a fossil of early 2000s internet culture. Only 3 years shy at the time of writing of its 20th anniversary, posting on dS still feels like the internet in 2008 or so, for better and for worse. The site is simple, but showing its age in the way it uses BBCode and smilies, the antiquated Personal Message and block systems, and stuff like topic subscriptions (seriously, does anyone even use those?).

With the drastic rise of competitors like Twitter’s rise to power in the 2010s, and the continued popularity of Reddit throughout the decade, why would anyone use a forum specifically for Spyro when all their friends and other interests are on one social media platform elsewhere? In addition, the large majority of the site’s active userbase almost exclusively posts in Stuff and Nonsense, with many users electing to talk about their favorite purple dragon elsewhere. Even Video Games and Idle Chatter boards are mostly dead compared to the always active S&N, and most topics that actually belong in a different board end up in S&N anyway, since it’s the only real active board left on the site.

A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

darkSpyro has not been without its fair share of creeps, groomers, and general deviants, and it’s quite a rogues gallery of disgusting weirdos.

Actual pedophiles like Levi, groomers like Sesshomaru75, and general recent jerks like ZapNorris (Drednaw) or Blackholes_Wolf. Names that will go down in infamy on the servers that contain this aging forum. In the case of some of the more heinous users, they’ve driven quite a few victims from the site with their disgusting actions. Other users have bullied droves of users off the site, like kappapopm and his feud with Aura24. This has led to a lot of larger users leaving or renouncing the site entirely, and in the case of Aura, denouncing the site publicly on social media.

Today, many of these users are thankfully gone through the efforts of the Hunters, social pressure from vigilant users, and a general shift in social norms and values between the early 2000s and today. Even though these monsters, bullies, and jerks may be gone, their legacy of pain and mistreatment remains, with many users vowing to never come back due to their actions.


Friend or Foe?

dS has always had an issue with friend groups. Lots of people see it as their turf, their stomping grounds, and overall like an old watering hole where everyone knows their name. Sometimes, this can be to the forum’s benefit, but more often than not, it ends up hurting the site in the long run.

There have been several times in darkSpyro history where the site has felt controlled by a specific group of people. A few years ago, Sesshomaru had everyone under their manipulative, abusive thumb. After they were ejected for their various misdeeds, another group of three essentially took over, using the forums, and specifically S&N, as their site to post whatever they please, whenever they please. With a dead forum for a franchise on its debatable last legs, who’s to stop you from making whole topics for something you could post in Random Thoughts, or something the length and depth of an average tweet? What’s to stop you from controlling the forum users through dogpiling and passively aggressively attacking others for their viewpoints, whether they’re an opposing ideology or something that should be educated? If you’re the only three left at the end of the day, what’s the point of being the kings and queens of a dead kingdom?

Witness Statements

Riolu-Blue-247:

“I was originally brought to the site by a friend, and my main focus was on the roleplay section. It was chaotic and full of roleplays that got out of control, but it was fun and active. Around the implementing of moderators the role play section began to die, worried about getting flagged people stopped making topics all together. These days its mostly closed group roleplays and only a few if that. I did have an extended leave from the site for a while after a major life event, so I may have missed other things that caused the role play section to start to wither but that is what happened from my perspective. After that it became a way to keep tabs on my friends because of the very well used Personal Thoughts topic in Stuff and Nonsense. I'd check in every day, skim read and see if any new and interesting topics had appeared. Honestly as bad as it was, I feel like in some ways the moderation is what began to kill darkSpyro. The 'suriving' section is Stuff and Nonsense which is the least harshly moderated. Yes moderation got rid of a lot of really bad people and that was a good thing, but people feared getting a moderated message. A black mark against you. That was especially so in the rp section as we often got into darker or more adult content as members grew up. But with the addition of moderation we just opted to not do anything so we didnt get anything from the mods. In some ways I feel like the 'drama' and the not so great members were what helped keep the forum seemingly active. Each bad person had different areas that they frequented so it looked like all areas were busy. But the site died a long time before that. Even back when I joined I guess you could day the site was dead. It was a forum for a series of games that had ended. A corpse waiting to rot. Not that it was all bad, I made most of my close friends from this site. Now I see it as a habit mostly... just absent minded clicks like a person reading the daily news when they wake up. I think the site's worst issues are in a way the people trying to keep it 'alive'. Back in the day it was a lot of people's only way to interact with their friends, now we have discord and other social media. Though the people that just say "the site is dead" certainly isnt boosting anyone to WANT to post. So I guess to summarise; the people hanging on to the 'life' of the forum, both sides, are what I think the biggest problem is. Just let go and pick up people you wanna talk to on discord.

TrixMaster100:
“Mine would be absolutely it got outclassed by other websites and apps. Especially when it comes to fandom news and such. I mostly explored more of myself the more I got into cozy spaces that are apart of the furry fandom and general art community. Where as DarkSpyro.net while having a lil soft spot in my heart, unfortunately does not provide as much of positive socialization as I would've liked.”

Aquarius:
“I first joined darkSpyro when I was 11 in June 2010. At the time, I was brought to the site mostly because of my hyperfixation and obsession with The Legend of Spyro at the time. For better or worse, darkSpyro was basically my real introduction to the internet. It was my introduction to online forums, to memes, to internet culture as a whole. It was the first time I was interacting with people who had a lot of the same interests as me since I didn’t have a lot of friends in elementary school.
Even then, I mostly lurked a lot on the site on the sidelines. I had friends here and there, but I definitely wasn’t part of the bigger social bubble until I joined the Discord in 2017(ish?). I was pretty naïve on a lot of things going on at the time, being a pretty sheltered kid/preteen at the time, and looking back it was probably a good thing I wasn’t involved in some of the bigger social bubble stuff like the Skype, given what happened with certain users(you know exactly who I’m talking about).
I could write a whole thesis on all the issues I’ve either seen, been part of, or had my say in. A decent bit of that I think most people in this community are well aware of. For a while, the reason I kept finding myself coming back all the time was because dS seemed to be, at least for a time, one of the only online communities that actively tried to keep itself in check and its toxicity in check. Many of the bad situations that happened were usually very black and white; look at situations like Levi or zer0dch.
Obviously though, that wasn’t the case. Tons of problematic users have made their way through the site. I don’t think I need to really lay out who, everyone in this community is well aware of who was and wasn’t a problem. It feels like it’s very rare for there to be a period of calm on dS where there isn’t at least one person causing issues for everyone else who is left in the community.
It’s hard for me to fully express a lot of my feelings on the issues of the site because most of my problems with the site I’ve already addressed when I wrote my “Open Letter” a few years ago and rallied the community behind it. That was one of the few shocking times that things actually got better since moderators on the site finally got the proper tools they needed to handle users causing issues all the time.
I think the current problem with the site is two things: The first is that forums in general are just becoming a thing of the past and are naturally dying out. The second is a mix of both problematic users and how they are moderated.
Now, I don’t mean this as a diss towards anyone who has worked in moderation in any form for this community. Hell, I was a mod on the Discord server for years, so I get it. But I’ve noticed there’s a lot more leniency than other sites when it comes to moderation. I know it can be hard considering how condensed the community is nowadays we’re more or less one big dysfunctional family at this point. It can be very difficult to moderate that. Especially when it comes to the forum itself, which I do not blame any of the moderators for: I think a lot of that is on dark52. Once again, I don’t mean to say this as a diss towards him or demean what he has done for this site and community, but it’s very clear that we’re long past an age where forums are popular. I don’t think the website is much of a priority for him anymore. I don’t think that’s a bad thing in any way given the site doesn’t get the traffic it once had, and Reignited did nothing to help improve it. But because of that, it had caused a toxic spiral for the site over the past several years. It’s what motivated me to write that open letter to begin with.
Toxicity breeds more toxicity, and it ends up affecting everyone. I know it sure as hell has affected me. I know in some situations no one will blame me for how upset I had gotten in certain situations, but there have also been situations where I was very clearly in the wrong and the one causing the toxicity in the first place. It gets to all of us eventually, whether we realize it or not. Combined with the leniency issue I mentioned earlier, and that toxicity just festers even more because it feels like nothing is being done. I can totally understand wanting and choosing to be professional and give people chances, of which we gave people a LOT of in the Discord server, at least when I was part of the mod team for it. But at the same time, I think we have to still remember: this isn’t the same forum anymore. All of us know each other here by now. The central community is pretty established at this point. If someone is causing problems for everyone else, and it continues after that has been communicated to them, then they shouldn’t be here. This is just a forum for a talking purple dragon, and one that doesn’t get much attention anymore. It really isn’t going to be the end of the world if certain things slip through the cracks and we just let people go. In a professional manner, yeah of course. But it really has to stop being such a prolonged process for a family of people who all know by this point what we all do and don’t tolerate.
Thankfully this hasn’t seemed to be a problem for the discord server in a very long time, which is pretty much the only way I interact with this community anymore. I couldn’t tell you what it’s like on the site, but I will say, dark52 isn’t actively involved in other endeavors such as the discord. He’s very disconnected from the community and I think that is the source of a lot of moderation problems. Again, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, there’s nothing wrong with darkSpyro not being a passion for him anymore. But it leaves us to deal with everything else, and I think that’s why the site is dead. The discord server has had its fair share of drama, but even if it was prolonged, it was eventually dealt with. darkSpyro as a site is dead not just because forums websites as a whole are becoming a thing of the past, but because it’s been stuck in this cycle of prolonged moderation of problematic users for a very long time, and it’s a cycle that I don’t know will ever fully be fixed, even with the site’s mod team doing their absolute best.
I left the website after ten years in 2020, partially because I was moving on in life and wanted to take focus on that, but also because I knew how badly the site’s cycle of toxicity had been affecting me. It was why I left the discord server for a whole year. As I said looking back , I know some of my anger towards certain situations was justified and I’m grateful that there are people here that will have my back on that. But there were also plenty of times where I was the problem. I was constantly an angry and spiteful person and I didn’t like who I was becoming. Especially after I moved out on my own and finally had space to be my own person, I started looking back on a lot on my life and just how much of a damaged person I was. darkSpyro only made that worse. I didn’t want that anymore, I didn’t like who I was or who I was becoming. It’s something I’m still trying to work on

constantly to this day.
I have very mixed feelings on the site nowadays. On one hand, it’s a site that I spent much of my time as a wallflower, always wanting to be part of the bigger community but never really achieving that until I joined the discord. It made me a very angry person and I was forced to deal with a lot of very horrible people. It was like all the high school and college drama I mostly managed to miss and not deal with was condensed in this site community instead. It made me a worse version of myself that I look back on with a lot of regret.
But it’s also a source of a lot of goodwill. Even as my middle school, high school, college, and work friends have come and gone, I’ve always had this community to come back to and to rely on. Some of my closest friends are from this community. I’ve met some of them in person on one of the best trips of my life. It has opened me up to a lot of other friendships online outside of dS that I really cherish. This community of people were the first people I came out to when I was questioning who I was as a person, and they all welcomed and helped me with loving arms. Whether I like it or not, it’s a very crucial part of my life and a core part of my identity.”

- - -

So there it is. I sit here, my scalpel bloodied with the truth, and take a step back. There wasn’t any inciting event. There wasn’t any single moment you can point to showing the beginning of the end. There were several problems rotting the forum away to its core, and not enough attention given to any of them to make a real difference. I finish my report on the death and take a drag of my cigarette. Who do I send this to? Are there any loved ones even left to care? Just in case, I send it to S&N. At least people will see it there. I put my jacket and hat back on and head back towards my home, scared, but optimistic for what may come from these revelations...

This is surprisingly well-written.

Quote: Vespi

A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

darkSpyro has not been without its fair share of creeps, groomers, and general deviants, and it’s quite a rogues gallery of disgusting weirdos.

Actual pedophiles like Levi, groomers like Sesshomaru75, and general recent jerks like ZapNorris (Drednaw) or Blackholes_Wolf. Names that will go down in infamy on the servers that contain this aging forum. In the case of some of the more heinous users, they’ve driven quite a few victims from the site with their disgusting actions. Other users have bullied droves of users off the site, like kappapopm and his feud with Aura24. This has led to a lot of larger users leaving or renouncing the site entirely, and in the case of Aura, denouncing the site publicly on social media.

Today, many of these users are thankfully gone through the efforts of the Hunters, social pressure from vigilant users, and a general shift in social norms and values between the early 2000s and today. Even though these monsters, bullies, and jerks may be gone, their legacy of pain and mistreatment remains, with many users vowing to never come back due to their actions.


Friend or Foe?

dS has always had an issue with friend groups. Lots of people see it as their turf, their stomping grounds, and overall like an old watering hole where everyone knows their name. Sometimes, this can be to the forum’s benefit, but more often than not, it ends up hurting the site in the long run.

There have been several times in darkSpyro history where the site has felt controlled by a specific group of people. A few years ago, Sesshomaru had everyone under their manipulative, abusive thumb. After they were ejected for their various misdeeds, another group of three essentially took over, using the forums, and specifically S&N, as their site to post whatever they please, whenever they please. With a dead forum for a franchise on its debatable last legs, who’s to stop you from making whole topics for something you could post in Random Thoughts, or something the length and depth of an average tweet? What’s to stop you from controlling the forum users through dogpiling and passively aggressively attacking others for their viewpoints, whether they’re an opposing ideology or something that should be educated? If you’re the only three left at the end of the day, what’s the point of being the kings and queens of a dead kingdom?

I'm literally MK Ultraing this forum as we speak.

I use subscriptions :c

I think the forum is just a place to ****post without the fear of getting backlash from random people

I shall read this later, but based on what I did skim, this seems scarily accurate. Thank you for the in-depth autopsy of darkSpyro!

seems about right to me minus needing some much harsher words toward a certain 2 mentioned users but you did okay fam you did A-Okay

oh i had an afternoon to think about it and i remembered some good notes i didnt see in there

sess dominance on this site was more like since the second round of mods were introduced since sess was ingrained kind of in that friend group and people were fed up with dealing with constant sess complaints and would just let stuff slide giveing even more power

the skype group.... the infamous skype group that self proclaimed illuminati of darkspyro that circled around it

stalker syndrome was issue in 2010-2012 wont name the girlies who had boys they didnt want all over them for years (other then me for whatever reason in 2018) but most of you know who they were

the religion wars of 2008-2011 spearheaded by users like Torok and Observer and Forgotten World i believe there was even an amv mashup at one point uploaded on youtube of the so-called "best fights" between them

when mods were added were at one of the peak points of Aura going through the stupid amount of bullying she had to deal with in 2012 dark was bombed with complaints from her, myself, and 2 other users i think would rather not be remembered by people here now. and of course the like 20 page topic that was then created to make the point

who can forget Razz the spyro artist with the love hate relationship with cynder and her fans

other toxic users of note like Prysom and Alydol and Zero

im sure i can think of more important moments there has been so much over the years

OH

and also thanks for all that compliment talk

Quote: LeewweewoowheeH

the skype group.... the infamous skype group that self proclaimed illuminati of darkspyro that circled around it

Okay but this is actually so funny because once the skype group finally decided to kick Sess out (she founded the Skype group, so along with her abuse and manipulation, this was also why it took so long), we moved to Discord because Skype sucks anyway lol

We also rebranded, because it would be weird to still call it the Skype group, and "Discord group" didn't have the same ring. So in honor of Mario Sunshine, we named it the Shriners.

And we forgot that the Shriners is an actual group on the same status of the illuminati LMAO it was COMPLETELY unintentional, I didn't even know the Shriners was an actual group either, so seeing this made me laugh.

^yeah lol its hilarious. Sess founded the first skype group as i remember until argument broke out with another user who then started skype group 2 which sess then moved to. i basically was friends with 1 or 2 maybe of the groups bigger users (not sess sess hated me) and so whatever important happened in there i would normally find out about but i never wanted to be a part of it though because the way people described it back then was so secret club illuminati it made me want to roll my eyes into the back of my head lol but that was teenage us idk how you guys handle it now. i was told sess got kicked from the group before everything blew up and the skype group shutting down was in fact just last year or 2020 i forget now. the shriners bit LOL it was meant to be or something man for real lol

"tl;dr"

Quote: LeewweewoowheeH

^yeah lol its hilarious. Sess founded the first skype group as i remember until argument broke out with another user who then started skype group 2 which sess then moved to. i basically was friends with 1 or 2 maybe of the groups bigger users (not sess sess hated me) and so whatever important happened in there i would normally find out about but i never wanted to be a part of it though because the way people described it back then was so secret club illuminati it made me want to roll my eyes into the back of my head lol but that was teenage us idk how you guys handle it now. i was told sess got kicked from the group before everything blew up and the skype group shutting down was in fact just last year or 2020 i forget now. the shriners bit LOL it was meant to be or something man for real lol

HA yeah not gonna lie you dodged a bullet.

Yeah, the group today is waaaaaaaay different now than how it used to be. Now it's just a chill, very small and very private, friend group with no drama or anything. It's the polar opposite of what it used to be and what it should have been in the first place. Plus, it's sort of a testament of how much we've grown as people, it's pretty radical, I love my friends.

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah i had a feeling lucky me lol............ but YO for real for real im happy for you that def sounds different then the one i knew and then having a cool group of friends like that is really nice!

This needs to go in the history books

^ive thought for a long time now of making like a novel length biography of the history of this forum i think im probably the only user left who has been around long enough (2007) and still has contact with enough of the users who saw the parts i missed to ask about stuff with and the patience to do something like that lol well.....................................not sure about the patience as that is what kept me from the attempt so far kind of like how carm did/does with the blog except like the whole thing to the very best of my knowledge and research never knew where to cut it off tho

Reading this honestly makes me glad I started 'drifting', occasionally popping in but often giving wide berths in time between visits since 2013. I have been very distant and uninvested in this forum for almost a decade.

All I really see from this site now is a spam of useless threads in this very subsection of the forum.

I've always had issues with being toxic, I have some very specific memories from my childhood where it would feel like something in my brain snaps and then I start breaking things or hurting myself or others (emotionally, but sometimes I did hurt myself physically). I would come unhinged and do and say terrible things. I felt like I needed everybody's validation but I would intentionally do things that made people hate me, and I took a sick pleasure in it during the moment but then afterwards I would break down and punish myself.

This toxic cycle of behavior only grew worse as I got older and I could never keep anybody close for too long. I lost a lot of friends and good opportunities in life. I just kept sabotaging myself whenever something good would happen. I couldn't deal with any bit of pressure, I would feel that same "snap" in my brain, and I'd have to go be a jerk to someone or damage someone's property or my own or something and punish myself. Hurting my friends was a way for me to cope with this and punish myself at the same time, so of course I could never keep many close friends. And then of course I'd throw a temper tantrum like a child, ugly crying on the floor and punching things. But I didn't have the self awareness to see how truly sad and pathetic this was at the time.

That kind of self awareness did come eventually though, and I thought I was going insane. I was at a very dark place in life. And my behavior began getting worse, and I began recognizing the patterns more and more, and my wife (who I had been with since high school, got married in college) noticed a lot of it too, but eventually I had began spending more and more time online here and in other communities (some I had been a part of before, some were new) and making people hate me became my coping mechanism.

I had acted that way before in this community but most of it was through PMs or off site communication. I joined on January 1 2009, and by May of 2009 I remember already becoming paranoid of some things and pushing people away, saying really nasty things to them that my mother would've rightfully grounded me until I was 18 for. Eventually this devolved from pushing away friends to attempting to make the entire community hate me through my intentionally inflammatory things I would say and drama I would cause. I remember, starting around 2017 or so, intentionally aligning myself with unpopular users just to make more enemies. Users that really had some problems going on like I did. Instead of encouraging them to get help, I would encourage them to keep doing what they were doing. It was very manipulative. But I eventually came to enjoy watching things burn down (whether here, somewhere else online, or in my IRL friend group that I eventually got kicked out of)

The self revelation came over a period of 3 years or so. 2019-2021 was definitely the darkest point in my life, mentally. I lost pretty much everything and everyone. My behavior I once was able to hide from my immediate family became more and more visible and my relationship with my mom became strained. I irreparably ruined my reputation among some online communities. I was kicked out of my group of friends I had tried so hard to maintain. The woman I was with for 8 years and was married to left me. My two best friends gave up and wanted nothing more to do with me.

There's a lot of other stuff that I could talk about, but eventually I went from just therapy to seeing a psychiatrist and eventually building a support system for myself. I can't change the emotions I have or my tendencies but I'm 100% responsible for how I react to it and I had used it as an excuse to be a terrible person for so long. I've since reconciled with my irl friend group I mentioned above, including one of my best friends who isn't apart of that group but she's helped me a lot and helped me through this even when I didn't deserve it, me and my mom are closer than ever and I see my family all the time.

Sorry, I don't know why I felt like sharing all that. It's been a very long road for me and this website was a very big part of it for a while. Especially from 2009-2011 and 2017-2021, including the discord server. I have a great support group now (including a discord server I've been in since 2020) and I'm really trying to just make it through each day. I've still slipped up a few times this year during stressful points in my personal life. But I'm getting there

I've apologized too many times and had too many chances, but I guess I thought this was a good place to stop for a moment and say I'm sorry again, and I hope everybody is doing well.

Geez Strawberry, that sounds absolutely rough. If you're acknowledging and working towards to get better, hopefully that's only the beginning of changing a lot of things for the better.

Reading all of this makes me tempted to share my horrendous encounters with two DS users that I've never heard anyone speak about. X'D Poor ol' DS has had a rough life.