(Note to members, visitors and other site members, this topic is not intended to attack specific calculator sites or members or claim any site as inferior or superior. Any event described below happened or were perceived that way between 2011 and 2014 and we are simply posting this because since the Pimathbrainiac incident, more and more people have been asking why CW opened. What we believe is that diversity is better and that Cemetech, CodeWalrus and Omnimaga are different from each others and should be ran the way their respective admins want. Since this topic was posted and reviewed by the entire CW staff, if you feel anything below is objectionable, quote it and let us know so that we can address it.)Topic edited in 2016 to append informations about why I stepped down from Omnimaga in 2011, since that was initially missing from this post. EDITED again in 2017 with a link to a safe-haven section topic explaining further.Since this website was founded, it was one of our goal to be as transparent as possible towards our userbase (excluding of course sharing our admin passwords and such stuff). On some sites, warnings, bans and even future staff changes may be announced publicly, while on other sites, all of this is kept private. We chose the first option for the most part, even if sometimes this could cause a bit of friction, because we felt that people should know that we are doing something about situations.
There is one thing, however, that we were not transparent about, but that it was only a matter of time before it goes public: The reasons why CodeWalrus opened in the first place. We apologize for not saying it sooner but we felt that to spare the TI community from a potential massive episode of drama at the time, it was better to wait until the whole thing is done. We explained it before, especially during the pimath incident when people were asking questions, and many people figured it out by themselves from the fact I founded both Omnimaga and CodeWalrus, but since more and more people have been asking in the last two weeks, we felt that it is now time to officially explain it:
To sum things up, after three years of growing disagreements and conflicts about the mentality/direction changes that Omnimaga admins underwent after I gave them ownership of the site, we finally called it quit then branched out into our own site: CodeWalrus. I and many others might not have handled the situation correctly over the years, but the thing is that at one point, it became clear that things were not gonna work. And something that not many people know is that the idea about a new site was not first brought up in June 2014, but rather in September 2011 (I forgot until I checked my old Omni PMs two weeks ago).
The TL;DR that follows is the chronology of events that ultimately led to CodeWalrus
(green text denotes when the new site idea was considered or became a thing, with key dates in bold):
Quote-September 1st 2001: I founded Omnimaga.
-March 3rd 2004: Omnimaga finally gets a website.
-July 8th 2011: I am forced to step down from my admin position, as result from high community pressure against Omnimaga's stance against hostility and rule enforcement. Health problems, mainly related to things explained here were one of the other factors.
-July 15th 2011: Omnimaga and TIMGUL ownership transfered to AngelFish, Geekboy1011, Netham45, Hot Dog, Juju, Rcfreak0, Ztrumpet and Eeems, via the following e-mail (I didn't have AngelFish's e-mail):
-September 6th 2011: Worrying about Omni moderation becoming biased and too lax towards provocative remarks, this is the first instance where I brought up the idea about a new site, via PM, but the recipient info was lost since his account no longer exists.
-March 6th 2012: Juju demoted from Omni staff. Lack of info about his demotion and the fact that he was by far the most (if not only) active Omni maintainer at the time result into the long-term future of Omnimaga and its transparency being called into question.
-Late April 2012: United-TI merges into Cemetech. Out of anger due to Omni's state, the news article about UTI's demise is photoshopped into an Omnimaga death prediction (inspired by calc.org's), set in the then-future of April 2014:
(that image was hosted on Removedfromgame, which recently shut down and the original URL was http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/futureofomni.png . That image was never shown in public until now, but some people saw it before.)
-Summer 2012: Major Omni restructure is also announced around that period, but info about it is minimal. It is believed at the time by members that the site and staff will finally be updated to ensure the long-term viability of Omnimaga as we knew it, while the site will retain close to its original mentality/policies.
-Fall 2013: This is when talk about the Omni 2.0 upgrade becomes more frequent and when large changes in site moderation happen. Some people have the impression that rule enforcement now depends of which admin is online and if that admin likes the person and discussion or not (for example, one admin once warned someone for posting a 9gag link). Officially, admins can act at their own discretion at any time. Some members including myself no longer feel welcome on Omnimaga.
-March 2014: Omni site upgrade happens in emergency, due to major security exploits being discovered. However, many administrative decisions (eg the topic URL changes), as well as moderation actions, starts controversy.
-May 29th 2014: Judgment Day (the final incident before discussions about a new site starts.)
-June 2014: Discussion about the new site between myself and Pimathbrainiac. Hosting, content and my activity level are the main concerns for the new site because I lack VPS management skills and didn't want to pay too much for a brand new site.
-October 3rd 2014: Perhaps as a last-ditch effort to make an extra contribution to help Omni (the reason was forgotten), DJ Omnimaga applies for Coders of Tomorrow one last time, providing that he doesn't get global mod privileges.
-October 14th 2014: DJ starts seeking for opinions about VPS providers and one person is given hints that a new calculator site is being considered.
-October 23rd 2014: The final conflict before the new site project officially starts. At this point there is no turning back.
-October 24th 2014: I co-founded this site with aeTIos, Streetwalrus, Pimathbrainiac and Juju (codenamed TI-Walrus). The plan was to only give access to close friends that are hard to reach outside Omnimaga and interested in such project first, then gradually give hints that the site exists through December then open to public on January 1st 2015.
-November 2nd 2014: VPS rented
-November 4th 2014: Site name chosen: CodeWalrus is the winner, with codewalr.us as a domain name, owned by pimathbrainiac at the time (later Scipi).
-November 11th 2014: Site opens in invite-only mode and is leaked to Matrefeytontias by accident (he was supposed to get the URL a few days later).
-November 11th 2014: As a last-ditch effort to make Omnimaga revert back to its old ways before we go all-out with CW, matrefeytontias instigates a petition on Omni that the CW staff and most of the then-future founding members then join, discuss in private then sign, but since the site project predates the petition by weeks, it is too late already. As a compromise, CW focuses on being solely a programming team with the old Omni forum rules as long as the petition effects last. The effects will finally last about three weeks.
-December 2014: Site slowly gets revealed to public, with some minor incidents on December 8th. Official announcement scheduled for December 15th is then posted 5 days earlier.
-January 1st 2015: Site opens to public and all members awaiting account activation are approved.
Just because Omnimaga is now ran the way it is doesn't mean it's bad, however, same for their admins. Same for Cemetech, Revsoft, TI-Planet, etc. Every site administration is free to run their site the way they want. CodeWalrus simply offers something new (that used to exist back in the days) for more TI community diversity. It would be very bad if the only TI site in existence was, for example, CodeWalrus, because then there would be less diversity. However, because many of the Omnimaga members who moved to CodeWalrus were by far their most active posting ones (for example, 25% of all August-November 2014 posts were by me and I stopped posting there on December 22nd, aside from a goodbye post in March), this caused Omnimaga activity to drop considerably. Also, the entire Omnimaga staff stopped posting completely between December 19th and January 2nd, which probably didn't help either.
My hope is that one day the Omni admins at least start posting more again on Omni, since that would make it easier to keep the new members they got (just look at Cemetech). They already have a new type of userbase that are fine with the new policies or who joined after they came in place, now free from the drama that our differences brought in. Some CW members still posts there. But we felt that CodeWalrus was necessary for the community and to keep everyone around, even if we wished that other solutions could have been possible at the time. In fact, here are the first 12 members who joined CodeWalrus before the site was leaked:
DJ Omnimaga - 2001
Streetwalrus - 2012
aeTIos - 2010
Juju - 2010
Keoni29 - 2011
matrefeytontias - 2012
Hayleia - 2011
Duke Take Eiyeron - 2011
Scipi - 2011
unknownloner - Mar 2013
Thecoder1998 - Oct 2013
Vijfhoek - 2012
The year besides the nickname is when they joined the TI community. All of them joined Omnimaga prior the policy changes and only four joined after Juju got demoted.
Something to keep in mind is that after CW was opened, I often got blamed for all the drama that happened on Omnimaga prior my 2011 resignation. The problem, however, is that those people always looked at my reactions without the original context, failing to realize that it was almost always the same group of individuals instigating the drama in the first place (most likely on purpose, since they didn't do any effort to do otherwise and were fully aware of the consequences). In other occasions, they did not start the initial drama, but as that drama was about to resolve itself, they joined in and added extra fuel to the fire. My resignation from Omnimaga was caused by those repeated incidents, combined with severe health issues and not knowing how to setup SMF software so that I can remain admin, but without the global moderator privileges. Those people are partly to blame for what happened to Omnimaga afterwards, because if it wasn't for their behavior, I would still be Omnimaga administrator today.