(moving this from squarebracket onto here because i think its a bit out of place on sb)
I would like to explain the backstory of this individual and how they became part of SquareBracket.
I first met this person around the tail end of 2021. At the time, SquareBracket was going by “CheeseRox” and was completely private due to petty drama with the original SubRocks. When this person first showed up, it was through a friend of his during the annihilation of the SubRock.TK Discord server. When we first talked, he had the idea of getting me to add a malicious Discord bot into my friend Jack’s Discord server for his website FulpTube.org in exchange for me “getting respect from his friends”. Jack and I didn't talk for months because of this. In retrospect, he was basically manipulating me. It was horrible.
Fast forward to September 2022, SquareBracket was down for a month due to the codebase being heavily worked on behind the scenes. Somewhere along the line, Jack, who was hosting at the time, and I had a small fallout over when the site would relaunch. For context, during this time, between June-September 2022, SquareBracket was hosted on a Mac Mini that I didn't have SSH access to. Every time I wanted to push updates into production, I would have to DM Jack about it. This was complicated. He was usually inactive, and I had a short temper. This caused me to reach out to the individual for help with hosting.
Because I wasn't sure Jack would've been willing to transfer the squarebracket.pw domain to someone that hated him, the person pitched the idea for a new website, which I will refer to as “QTV”. “QTV” was supposed to be big. As far as I remember, his vision was for it to be the “Next Vlare”. When he made a “QTV Staff” group chat about it, he added a few people, including this ex-logokid friend of theirs, who made the QTV logo in a day and planned to bring his Machinima-like channel into the website…
…and then… nothing happened.
The person insisted I used the BunnyCDN service on QTV, even though storing everything on the VPS would've been fine. Neither SquareBracket or QTV was going to be that big to require external services. And then at the end of 2022, my computer broke down, so I was unable to work on it for a while.
Fast forward to 2023. He (and a now-former friend of his) had recently acquired a somewhat big “OYC” website from the former owners who were a week away from shutting it down. And I was finally able to finish adding the code required to interface with BunnyCDN on OpenSB. But there was this dilemma I had.
By 2023, most of the people in the grand “OYC” community that were going around spreading allegations of me the year prior had dipped out. I made the mistake of thinking it was over for good, and I wondered if it was possible to upload my questionable drawings onto QTV. At the time, I was 16, and this person was 20. Since I thought he had experience with websites, and because he was older, I tried asking him if I could upload my stuff on my website, and he would always make vague responses which basically led to no definitive conclusion.
QTV launched on April 8th 2023. It was originally meant to be a separate website from SquareBracket, as I thought I had lost the files to it back when my computer died. But the relaunch went so terrible, that once I found the files to SquareBracket, it was merged into QTV. From this point on, QTV was SquareBracket, albeit a rebrand of it. The launch went terribly solely because I didn't know if I should have posted my questionable drawings or not, so I reluctantly did. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, behind my back, but I'm pretty sure he told his friends to not use QTV. Meanwhile, in our direct messages, he was saying that he didn't mind my questionable drawings. This was his “opinion” on the matter up until late-2024.
During the rest of 2023, I spent most of it trying to rework OpenSB into having proper content filtering settings so it was possible to opt-in to seeing the questionable drawings. Oh and he wanted to add ads on QTV, so I somehow had to figure out how to make those work together. The end result was a buggy pile of shit known as “OpenSB 1.0” that barely held up together. This was my fault, however the VPS he owned in which QTV was hosted on was also horribly slow. In late-2023, when his “company” was formed, he wanted QTV to be part of it. I decided to not have QTV be part of the “company”, solely due to the god awful taste it was in, but also because his idea of the “company” felt too good to be true.
In 2024, QTV was relaunched into SquareBracket. There were plans for a new separate QTV, but plans for it fell apart. His involvement within the website gradually declined as time went on. In June 2024, SquareBracket moved to a new VPS, and the questionable drawings were finally banned off the platform. In November 2024, during the incident as mentioned multiple times in the past, he resigned from SquareBracket, blocked me and took the old VPS and an alternate domain with him.
In retrospect, having him as part of SquareBracket was a mistake. It almost felt like a hostile takeover was going to take place. I regret having this person on the team and I would like to apologize for this.