Open Carnage Forum
Open Carnage (OC) was a Halo modding forum that I launched in February 2012, which most focused on Halo 1 on the PC. The forum closed its doors in September of '23 due to complications from almost two years of DDoS attacks.
OC was the last active Halo modding forum, and despite the advent of Discord, it largely maintained relevance in the following two ways.
Raffle
A novel economy system based on raffle tickets, where two were automatically drawn at the end each month. A winning ticket granted $25 as either PayPal cash or donation credit, with such donations providing the perk of permanently elevated account permissions (more storage and styling options for posts, etc.). Tickets could only be earned in two ways:
- Completing a contribution listed atop the site's main page, such as releasing a map that achieves a minimum third-party rating, fulfilling another person's script request, or winning an art contest.
- Being gifted tickets from another member, usually because you did something that they found to be special and wasn't outlined on the contributions list. Each staff member also had a discretionary balance of tickets to hand out as they saw fit, and to ensure that only normal members could win, the balances held by staff never went into the monthly drawings.
A public ledger documented all earnings and transactions, and all balances would automatically reset after drawnings, creating a clean slate each month for all to have an equal chance. Over the years, a single person won so many times that they'd earned $475, and in total, $3,675 was awarded! The system provided a repeatable and engaging incentive for all sorts of content and events.
Partnerships
Submissions to our map, asset, and script release sections were automatically shared to our Discord server, and if found to be abiding by the rules, were auto-posted to numerous other servers within the niche by means of the platform's "Publish" feature. Servers opted in to receive such content so as to better keep their community up-to-date, and most enticingly, because each server was listed atop the site's release sections, along with their join link.
The forum was different enough from Discord for mutual promotion to not be detrimental to either party. And as another perk for us, that list of servers made it clear that releasing on OC meant an even greater audience than just the forum's users, often making us the sole platform for a piece of content.
Closed Carnage
The site remains up in a read-only state, which has unfortunately become the norm for closed forums, as more often than not, they just go entirely offline. Fortunately, the heart of the community still lives on in the site's Discord server, now based around keeping up all of these old friendships that we've made.
Discord is great for quick chats and feedback, but the content and particularly the knowledge shared on its platforms aren't publicly searchable. And even if you're a member of the server hosting what you're looking for, it's very difficult to parse through its sole method of performing searches. When we all migrated everything to Discord, we lost something that we all took for granted: The ability to find knowledge without having to pull it out of someone's brain each time.
I don't have any intention of taking the forum down, so feel free to have a peek!