Squidboards Under New Ownership

Squids,

After over a decade as it's steward, AlphaZealot will be stepping down as the owner of Squidboards. As of June 1st, 2023, his company Xyelot, LLC has sold Squidboards to Equistellar Media, Inc, a company owned by myself which will serve as the business entity for Smashboards and Squidboards going forward.

As long time members of the Smash community, both myself and AlphaZealot understand the importance of Smashboards and the history contained there. Ensuring it's longevity and survival was one of the guiding reasons he acquired the site from MLG in 2012 and is the reason I have chosen now to do the same. In collaboration with TheRapture we later launched Squidboards as a sister website in 2015 using our years of experience with Smashboards, and we will continue to support it in the future.



As we look forward, I aim to explore ways to allow Squidboards to better serve the Splatoon community. This site was launched in a very different era for gaming communities and we can do better to support the current ecosystem.

For the website itself, all transfers and updates have already been made, so there will be no downtime for the site. In the immediate future, there is only one actual change that will be happening to the site for our Premium users. As Squidboards is now under a new business entity, Premium payments will have to be updated as there is no process for us to transfer them.

If you currently have Premium, you will keep it until the original end of it's cycle after which it will not auto-renew. If you would to keep your Premium subscription and continue to support the site afterwards, you will need to subscribe again once it expires.

We appreciate all of you who allow us to keep the site running with your support!


I am excited to see what the future of both Smash and Splatoon have in store for us and I am eternally grateful for Chris' leadership for the site as well as his other countless contributions to the Smash scene as a whole. I hope you'll join me in expressing my gratitude to him and wishing him and his wife well as they soon embark on a new journey as parents!

 

Save any posts or conversations that are important to you, folks. When things like this happen it usually means the site's not going to be around for much longer.

 

Save any posts or conversations that are important to you, folks. When things like this happen it usually means the site's not going to be around for much longer.

Why is that?

 

Save any posts or conversations that are important to you, folks. When things like this happen it usually means the site's not going to be around for much longer.

I understand the apprehension in situations like this, but I have been the technical administrator for Squidboards since it was created in 2015 and for Smashboards since 2013. I will not be doing anything drastic I couldn't do before :p

 

Save any posts or conversations that are important to you, folks. When things like this happen it usually means the site's not going to be around for much longer.

how do i save 5332 messages T-T

 

how do i save 5332 messages T-T

The way you do

 

The way you do

:0000

 

Save any posts or conversations that are important to you, folks. When things like this happen it usually means the site's not going to be around for much longer.

No, that's what happens when the long-standing community admin sells the site to an outside entity who has no interest in maintaining it or financial reason to keep it running (which, you are correct, has happened to a lot of video game websites over the years). That's not the case here; the ownership is being transferred to another long-standing admin who is inside the community and has already been running the site for nearly a decade. I can understand your confusion if you stopped reading after the comma, but I think you missed the part where Warchamp7 is the new owner.

 

No, that's what happens when the long-standing community admin sells the site to an outside entity who has no interest in maintaining it or financial reason to keep it running (which, you are correct, has happened to a lot of video game websites over the years). That's not the case here; the ownership is being transferred to another long-standing admin who is inside the community and has already been running the site for nearly a decade. I can understand your confusion if you stopped reading after the comma, but I think you missed the part where Warchamp7 is the new owner.

The last news piece on the front page is from before Splatoon 3 came out. Doing anything drastic, as Warchamp said, would imply doing anything at all. If they keep the lights on for this website for the foreseeable future, that's fine, but when you look at Smashboards which had this same announcement it's pretty obvious where the focus is.

 

The last news piece on the front page is from before Splatoon 3 came out. Doing anything drastic, as Warchamp said, would imply doing anything at all. If they keep the lights on for this website for the foreseeable future, that's fine, but when you look at Smashboards which had this same announcement it's pretty obvious where the focus is.

There could be new focus on Squidboards later down the line.

 

There could be new focus on Squidboards later down the line.

Until then, this site is what it is. The change of ownership isn't good news, it doesn't even have to be bad news, it's just news that could be bad down the line. I would very much love to be wrong about this cause squidboards did a lot of good back in the day, but let's be real here.

 

Oh wow. You own this place too? Guess I’ll have to annoy you over here as well.

 

Ultimately, whether or not Squidboards makes a resurgence is entirely dependent on co-operation between regular players, content creators, tournament organisations, and Squidboards / Warchamp7.

Personally, I think now is quite literally the perfect time to rev up Squidboards for a resurgence. Splatoon 3 is as popular as ever, Splatoon content creators are getting tired of putting their resources in different places, tournament organisers need a more central place to the community to organise, there's a growing sentiment against the community staying in non-indexible Discord servers... all of the dominoes are lining up perfectly for Squidboards to bring about a renaissance in Splatoon communication and content.

The hard part about all of it would be attracting users to the site; that's where all of the connections I listed above come into play. On top of that, if Warchamp7 wants to brace this site for a new wave of users, he'll have to bring on new mods, probably overhaul the rules, update the site theming... A bit of a handful, but absolutely doable.

 

This ownership change is basically a mirror of the Smashboards change, and it's from one inside long-standing community member to another, so basically nothing of note happens with regards to site health. The cancelling of auto-renew could hurt the site in the short-term, but again, the site traffic is so low to begin with it'll likely survive. (Also it's probably running off the same pool of funds? Probably only the domain name is the real cost here for the sister site.)

The issue is a lot of social media (discord/reddit) ended up overpowering Squidboards around it's inception, so unless there's some big reason to return to BBS like say, the sudden collapse of well-established social media, then it's hard to make a case for using Squidboards over alternative methods of communication.

I think some sort of way to make Squidboards the premiere one-stop shop for all your splatoon content needs would be the way to really rev up the site, but with such fierce competition from other social media, it's unlikely to take off. Even aggregating all the upcoming map data and other stuff, I still can't see it taking off.

Felt like dropping my two cents on the matter since this place holds a lot of nostalgia for me.

 

Ultimately, whether or not Squidboards makes a resurgence is entirely dependent on co-operation between regular players, content creators, tournament organisations, and Squidboards / Warchamp7.

Personally, I think now is quite literally the perfect time to rev up Squidboards for a resurgence. Splatoon 3 is as popular as ever, Splatoon content creators are getting tired of putting their resources in different places, tournament organisers need a more central place to the community to organise, there's a growing sentiment against the community staying in non-indexible Discord servers... all of the dominoes are lining up perfectly for Squidboards to bring about a renaissance in Splatoon communication and content.

The hard part about all of it would be attracting users to the site; that's where all of the connections I listed above come into play. On top of that, if Warchamp7 wants to brace this site for a new wave of users, he'll have to bring on new mods, probably overhaul the rules, update the site theming... A bit of a handful, but absolutely doable.

Tbh I think this is easy, we really just need to push squidboards especially w/ twitter slowly taking its downfall as it is, which is where a good majority of the community comp/tos/casuals/sfm folks' all reside^^
It's just about getting the big organizations to advertise here and encourage the community to trickle over, but it might be more likely that they trickle into dozens of discord servers before they replace twitter.... but eh who knows !

(Context; I have been a comp player since 2019, and a TO for Inkling Performance Labs since 2020 as one of the founders of the org)

 

Personally, I think now is quite literally the perfect time to rev up Squidboards for a resurgence. Splatoon 3 is as popular as ever, Splatoon content creators are getting tired of putting their resources in different places, tournament organisers need a more central place to the community to organise, there's a growing sentiment against the community staying in non-indexible Discord servers...

Doubling down on the bolded point since social media has opted to start imploding. Twitter and Reddit, two massive hubs of Splatoon info, are sinking further and further as time goes on, and none of the standard "social-media-like" alternatives (Bluesky, Threads, HIVE, cohost, etc.) are really great a collating a bunch of information in one place. Except cohost, but my own personal favour makes me biased.

 

Doubling down on the bolded point since social media has opted to start imploding. Twitter and Reddit, two massive hubs of Splatoon info, are sinking further and further as time goes on, and none of the standard "social-media-like" alternatives (Bluesky, Threads, HIVE, cohost, etc.) are really great a collating a bunch of information in one place. Except cohost, but my own personal favour makes me biased.

I agree! I personally think that we should try to come up with something to drive up interest in Squidboards. This is the perfect time for a resurgence, and if we make a concentrated effort, I think we can pull it off!

 

I may be biased, but I am personally thrilled that Warchamp is the new owner of SqB and SB. Long has he toiled to make these sure these sites are for the benefit of the users that come. But he can only do so much. Ultimately, it is up to the users to make sure that places like this remain viable in the face of other social media giants, and, of course, in the face of Discord, which has pulled A LOT of the gaming community away from the traditional forum structure.

Users are what makes a forum great....that is why a lot of attention goes to SB because the community, on average, has 40-80 people present on the boards and posting. The SqB community is a bit different....the SqB Discord server is always much more busy than here....I always chalked that up to most SqB users coming after Discord was conceived, so it sees more traffic. On the other hand, SB official Discord is very quiet compared to the SB forums because the forums have been established since the early 2000s and therefore has a larger dedicated base.

That said, I know that Warchamp is dedicated to both SB and SqB and I think the change in leadership will lead to good things for both forums. Here's hoping. Congrats again @Warchamp7.

 

As you can see I am not someone established here, but I have in general a lot of nostalgia for forums. So take my post with grain of salt.
Hoping that maybe I can serve as a reminder that other folks might still stumble into the site and give a bit of my outsider perspective.
In my opinion people come to Squidboards for two things:
1- Information
2. Community.
Having these being up and centre help. I think in general you are good covering them up. For community I've been to forums that treat their niche as if itw as a convention. they have different activities going on and yearly traditions to keep the community interest. Of course, it can cause burnout if not enough staff/volunteers is handling it but maybe that could be something that can help catch some eyes if the traffic allows it for them to have a chance.
Photoshop contests
Theme contest and voting for the freshest inkling/octoling.
Find from where in the game this blurry/zoomed in picture is from.
Caption this image.
Create a fanfic/fanart on different prompts.

I dunno, that kind of activities back in the day were fun and got me curious enough to join a community I was just passing by, because I'd read the threads with the entries and the fun they were having and made me want to participate. It is just a lot of work to set up and maintain. People like a chance to chime in when it comes to games like this where the characters we use might have become their own original character with a backstory,

 

squidboards is still alive people