A Farewell

It's been almost 12 years since WoTLabs began. It's been almost my entire adult and professional life, and now it's time to actually say goodbye.

For that, I owe a few words and explanations. It's been months since the incident and WoTLabs has been offline since then. In mid-January, I received notice from the Roskomnadzor (Russia's federal agency in control of the media) threatening to block my website in Russia if a strangely unmodified photograph of Putin (reproduced below for clarity) wasn't removed. Thinking this was an odd request but not wanting to deprive Russian users from not accessing their stats, I consented but decided to give my users some advanced notice (of 24 years) so as to not cause confusion by the sudden removal of content, as well as reproducing said photo on every page of the forum. Again, for clarity. For some reason the Roskomnadzor did not like this, and proceeded to blacklist the forum within the Motherland.

Only a couple of weeks later, coincidentally I'm sure, the forum was targeted by group of hackers that called themselves a name that has not been heard in connection to any other data breach. Again, not suspicious at all. Through exploits in the third-party forum software, they gained access to the forum and leaked the database. Thanks to the technology employed in the protection of user data, no passwords were leaked. Not wanting to gamble on how deeply they had accessed the server, I took down the forum and the main website. I notified users of the breach, and after pondering for a week, I decided not to bring my websites back online.

Which leads me to the farewell. For a long time now, I've grown away from World of Tanks and from programming as a whole. I've moved to a different country thrice, enrolled in university again for a second graduation, now in Psychology. My mind had not been on WoTLabs for a long time, and I think it showed, didn't it? Ultimately, I couldn't give it the attention and care it deserved, and it's time to let it go. Other websites popped up over the years that have done more than I ever could, but at the same time, we can look back and celebrate what we actually did.

We were one of the first player-run communities outside of the official forum. We helped hundreds, thousands of players to improve their gameplay. We were instrumental in the development of the metrics we use to this day to help players evaluate their own performance. We grew to be famous and infamous, loved and hated throughout the history of World of Tanks. This is turning out to be a lot more dramatic than I originally intended. Maybe letting me type whatever wasn't a good idea. But anyway, we died as we lived: Free, independent and unwilling to bend to a cocksucking dictator.

With love,
Neverwish