Community: Difference between revisions

This article or section may be out of date. (tagged This page hasn't seen any real updates since 2013, and it painfully shows with sites like NDJ/AIB and Gamefaqs being talked about as prominent Smash hubs.) You can discuss this issue on the talk page or edit this page to bring it up to date.

This article or section is incomplete. You can help SmashWiki by expanding or finishing it. The editor who added this tag elaborates: The page hardly touches on how the community has affected the content of the Smash games, and doesn't elaborate much on the community history as a whole.

The community is a self-supporting network of people that have banded together to make the Super Smash Bros. scene what it has become today. Most major tournaments are arranged by members of the community, and are sometimes supported and advertised by organizations such as EVO. Some significant sections of the community include Smashboards, GameFAQs, Smash-Mex, Nintendo Dojo, the Smash modding community^[1], Global Smasher Compendium (formerly), and SmashWiki itself.

The history of the Smash community spans about 14 years, mostly beginning with the creation of Smashboards which has become a major intersection for playing and discussing the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Some milestones include Melee's inclusion in professional tournament circuits such as MLG in 2006 and again at EVO in 2007^[2], the creation of the Global Smasher Compendium (now discontinued), a successful petition for Melee to be broadcast at EVO^[3], and the first unofficial community census in 2013.

In recent years the community has participated in the official franchise domain. Many members submitted Target Smash! and Home-Run Contest high scores as well user-generated content to the Brawl Smash Bros. Dojo!! while it was still being updated. The community is also partly responsible for some of the changes seen in newer Smash Bros. titles such as the inclusion of the third party characters Sonic in Brawl and Mega Man in Smash 4 by submitting requests and participating in polls.

Abuses against community websites

On 4 May 2011 Smashboards had its index page replaced by an automated script that exploited vBulletin software. A replacement page with a looping video and an announcement that the site had been hacked was the only consequence.^[4]

Widespread DDoS attack in 2013

On August 15, 2013, All is Brawl came under a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack). Other sections from the "All is" network were affected as well. The following day, Smashboards suffered an intrusive attack that led to a reset that lost the forum roughly 10 hours of data. On August 25, Smashboards went down, initially reporting that it was experiencing server issues^[5] and later confirmed that the site was also under a sustained DDoS attack^[6]. It is unknown if the Smashboards intrusion on August 15 is related to its DDoS attack on August 25. On August 27, the Project M website became the third site to go down as a result of a DDoS attack. For unknown reasons SSBWiki was spared throughout the ordeal.

All three sites remained mostly unresponsive until August 28, when Smashboards briefly went back up before trying the CloudFlare anti-DDoS service. AlphaZealot reported that owners from each site were working together to find a solution. ^[7] Project M webmaster Warchamp7 later told video game blog site Kotaku that "the only viable solution to the problem at this moment is expensive and not something we can easily pursue," but added there were plans to mitigate the attacks if they continued^[8].

By September 2013, all three sites were functional again, though while Smashboards and the Project M website came out relatively unscathed, the DDoS attack dealt significant damage to AiB's aging website that was already in notoriously poor condition, playing a part in accelerating the site's ongoing decline and eventual shutdown. The perpetrator behind the DDoS attack remains unknown to this day, though it's believed to have been someone with a vendetta against the competitive Smash community, given the targeting of the two primary competitive Smash hubs at the time and the website for the mod created with a heavily competitive-centric focus.

See also

• Smash news
• Crews
• Smashers

References

1. ^  The Kitty Corp Meow Mix Forums
2. ^  Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evolution 2007
3. ^  Update: Smash is Back!! Changes to the Evo 2013 Schedule
4. ^  Smashboards was hacked
5. ^  Smashboards' Facebook announcement on server issues
6. ^  Smashboards' Facebook announcement acknowledging a DDoS attack
7. ^  The Great Smash DDoS of 2013 by AlphaZealot on Reddit
8. ^  Top Smash Bros. Fan Sites Knocked Offline, Hackers Blamed on Kotaku, 28 August 2013
9. ^  AlphaZealot comment on webhosting reddit