If the retard didn't buy the SA brand.....fucking lol. That's all its fucking worth right now. I'd just shut down the front page and re-direct the domain to the forums. The bandwidth costs are probably not worth the fucking money. But I'd never fucking buy SA, Talk about a waste of fucking money, Jesus.
All those features made sense as paid subscriptions 15 years ago. It ate up a ton of bandwidth. Nowadays? No way.
Anyone ever remember the absolutely autistic reqs some forums had for avatars? There was even a trick to make your avatar a gif or a set of randomized pictures by tricking the software to linking to an offsite server. Wasn't it like 10mb free hosting at some places?
The money only made sense when SA was at the height of its popularity, when there wasn't anything else like it. Now there are fucking comments sections on IGN with more lenient moderation than SA and better content. When you had game devs posting there and shit. Now? What the fuck are you doing? Nobody goes to SA anymore, fucking nobody. Anything worth it just fled the sinking ship like rats. Lowtax should have sold it for millions like everyone else during the dot com boom. Instead, he didn't, then did nothing with it. Pretty much all competitors and clones of SA made out like fucking bandits, EXCEPT for Lowtax. Then he proceeded to run the fucking thing into the ground. He probably made less money off SA in all this time than if he just sold the fucking thing and lived off the interest.
But like I said, the history of SA is littered with stupid faggots SA as a petty fiefdom for their own little kingdoms where they could be in control. Lowtax was one of these and he did use it, until he was so retarded he got everyone smart and funny to run the fuck away, then relied on Radium, who basically snatched the code away from him to basically extort Lowtax into paying him, which Lowtax did, shit wages but hey, he got control of SA...which is uh....not...worth it. Its like taking over a shit filled toilet for your exclusive use. And the super is too drunk and on pills to do anything about it. Then he put in charge retarded fucking mods and admins who basically took all control away from him. So eventually he was exiled.
Basically, he let the forum run itself and just tried to earn money anywhere else. Now with total and complete loss of control, Lowtax doesn't want to be bothered with the thing. He probably sold the fucking thing for 50k and a case of Zima.
And the fucking pricing, Jesus. Remember, people could pay to change your avatar and people had to pay to change it back. Changing your avatar was one time use, Like a fucking token. Why anyone, ANYONE would pay for this is beyond fucking me in this day and age.
I also remember the 'Ban' sprees that Lowtax would go on when he was getting low on boxed wine and ambien. It was OH SO WACKY, where he'd just mass ban users and you had to pay to get unbanned, until people realized, "Oh, this faggot forum isn't worth it" and just check out. Also its forum had an economic model where it was profitable to ban people. It was amazing that shit lasted for as long as it did.
There's a front page?
(User banned for this post)
Only Lowtax gave a fuck about the front page.
EDIT:
I also remember people used to fuck with Lowtax by using chargebacks if they got banned.