Open Carnage (OC) was a Halo modding forum that I launched in February 2012, which most focused on Halo 1. 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, which, despite Discord, maintained much of its relevance through its raffle economy and publishing partnerships.

A one-of-a-kind economy system based on raffle tickets, with two automatically drawn at the end each month. A winning ticket granted $25 as either PayPal cash or donation credit, with the latter bringing permanently elevated permissions, such as more storage and styling options for posts, etc.

What was novel was how these tickets were acquired. The primary method involved making contributions described atop the site's main page, such as releasing a map that achieves a minimum third-party rating, fulfilling a script request, or winning an art contest. Tickets could be held onto for a chance to win, and they could be transferred between members like currency — allowing those with balances to reward others for whatever they'd like. Each staff member also had a monthly discretionary balance that could be handed out in this way, and for fairness, staff were blocked from winning the raffle.

A public ledger documented all earnings and transactions, and all balances would reset after drawnings — cleaning the slate for each month. This all provided a consistent and engaging incentive for a wide range of content and events.

Over the years, a single person had won so many times that they'd earned $475, and in total, $3,675 was awarded!

Submissions to our map, asset, and script release sections were automatically shared to our Discord server, and if abiding by the rules, were then auto-shared to numerous other servers within the niche by means of the platform's "Publish" feature. Servers opted in to receive such content to help keep their communities up-to-date, and most enticingly, because we listed each server atop the site's release sections — along with their invite link.

Our forum was different enough from Discord for such promotions to be mutually beneficial. And the server list brought us a bonus perk, as it indicated how far releases on OC reached beyond our userbase, making many creators feel that releasing elsewhere wasn't worth the effort.

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!