I figured it was worth responding to this recent blog, since there were many great points in it. My text is in bold. Parts of the original blog have been skipped for brevity. Please read the original for full context.

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As of 2019, I have been apart of the Paint community for seven years. That’s a pretty long time. Over time, I have seen the community grow, fall, crash, burn, and then come back.

We as a community persisted through the modern age, and even though there are better and more convenient ways to talk to friends... something about this place always seems to bring us back.

I care about this website, this community. And I’m sure you guys do too. But there are issues here that are undeniable and need addressing.

This is NOT meant to attack or ridicule HullBreach or anyone else. This is to be taken as criticism and advice to push Paint farther into the modern age and make it a better place for everyone.

(That’s a bold smilie.)

I once respected and feared the admin team. The trusted members who would lead and often make fun of us defined the site back in the day. When you think of the word “admin” you probably think about a trustworthy, responsible, and helpful person. Over time, that definition has dumbed down a disrespectful, irresponsible person who seem to care more about getting a laugh out of members than actually being a leader (note: this is not ALL admins here. You know who you are). The admin team either takes the website as a joke and has no interest in being a responsible leader, or sit back and watch as said events take place. It’s a disgusting trade off of corruption and lack of action. You were chosen by HullBreach and other overlords to look over the site and moderate; but instead all we see is fooling around.

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These rules should give members rights while limiting the power of admins. An admin should ONLY ban based on rules, not based on personal feelings. For example, a rule for bullying could go a few ways. Is it targeted harassment? (i.e. relentlessly leaving mean/annoying comments and constant insult bombardment in chat that the other party does not like) Give a warning. If it continues, it’s a 24 hr. ban. Ban situations should also be a innocent until proven guilty situation. Is what they were doing actually ban-worthy, or was it an overreaction? Admins should take a few minutes to address the situation before taking action. If an admin make a mistake or bans without reason, they should lose their position, after a fair amount of offenses. Also, an actual warning system would be nice, not just a /alert command. Warnings that are logged. This should hopefully create a balance between the balance of power and rights of the common member.

But in order to not have issues with admins continuing to not take things seriously... we need a new admin team.

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Last night I stripped admin and overlord powers from several members. This included both those who have not been active in over 3 months and those who have been abusing their powers in various ways. I will continue to monitor existing admins and overlords to determine which ones should stay as it and will also monitor active members who are deserving of promotions, as needed. Feedback would be appreciated, but please don’t beg to be an admin.

The original blog discussed areas where there is disagreement with respect to featuring content in blogs, etc. I’ve always tried to go by the “common sense” rule, but we probably need something more structured. It’s worth discussing in more detail what guidelines should be put into place for all content creation aspects of the community that involve admin approval, including blogs, paintings, polls, pinned BB threads, etc.


Did I mention the site bugs yet?

Now, I’m WELL aware of the progress Hull has made to update the joint and I appreciate him for it. But my man, you gotta listen to your site members. We’ve been telling you these things for a long time and they’re only just now being fixed. I feel like some things need more attention than others that just aren’t being prioritized.


Over the past 12 years, this collection of websites (starting with HullBreach Online) has lived through my growth as a Web developer and experienced all kinds of feature creep and splatters of spaghetti code as technology has changed, and as members have requested new featuresets. I’m currently in the process of trying to balance work, family, and other projects, with a complete overhaul of every website in the community. For those familiar with programming: I’m converting mostly procedural code into the model-view-controller paradigm and splitting out CSS from the code base to support skinning and theming of the websites. This has been on-going for several months and is probably about half way done. You will notice gradual changes happening when visiting the community, but behind the scenes EVERYTHING is changing. You may see a period of a week or 2 with only a few apparent tweaks or some temporary appearance changes, but there could actually be numerous changes behind-the-scenes to enhance security, privacy, and future growth.


First thing; security. I remember Hull mentioning that security has been updated but it still says “site unsecured” on every browser I try. This might just be me problem but if it isn’t, it’s still an issue and I hope it gets fixed soon. Every user’s IP is exposed 24/7 via the site (without a VPN of course).

Try visiting the websites with https:// The Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS don’t seem happy with the SSL encryption, but all other browsers I’ve tested give a nice padlock on the addressbar.

Another large issue is constant lag and crashes from the website at seemingly random intervals, which Hull has yet to comment on. Be it in the middle of a chat, posting a blog, or just chilling on the homepage, the site will just lag and crash out of nowhere. Now, I have no idea how something like this is caused and I won’t pretend to, but... stability should be a larger priority nonetheless, at the least larger than icon or emoji updates. At the moment we’re looking at the biggest site breakage since the 2017 Database Migration.

I know that lag, crashes, etc., are big issues. This has been a long-time struggle. I decided a while back that I didn’t want to sell out member information to sleazy advertisers, so I removed all third party ads from the community once Project Wonderful shut down. Back at the height of the community, there were about 7000 visitors per day, and ad revenue easily covered hosting costs that were about $350/month at the time, plus hardware and software I needed to keep everything updated and running. When traffic started falling a couple years ago, I merged the community under the umbrella of HullBreach Studios, our game development hobby/company that released a few indie titles on the Wii U. Revenue from those games sustained the costs, but the Wii U quickly died off once the Nintendo Switch arrived, so game revenue has not covered the server costs in a couple years. Samantha pays for her share of the server for a Sims 4 website she runs, but that still leaves a revenue deficit so far that HullBreach Studios is nearly folded.

That is all why I set up the Patreon account last year. The goal was to reach the threshold of $100/month in donations to cover server costs. I’m very grateful to those who have donated - since that has considerably helped - but the donations have unfortunately not closed the deficit for hosting costs. For that reason, I’ve been trimming services behind-the-scenes. Right now, the server’s hard disk is 92% full, and I just had to trim the database from 1GB RAM to 512MB RAM to cut costs. The latter seems to have led to all the recent issues we are seeing. I don’t say all this to beg for donations; I just want to be transparent. I’m considering pulling about $500 from my savings to fund the server for several more months in hopes that we will have some new apps and games out by then to close the deficit. If that doesn’t happen, I’m not sure what the next step will be.

The new PM system has also been a hot topic recently. Now, it’s relatively new, so I don’t know if it’s going to change, but what we have at the moment is... clunky, to say the least. It tries to emulate a newer chat system like Discord or Twitter DMs, but what it makes is a hard to read mess of a system, not to mention the years it takes to load each message. It would be better to style the new DM system after said modern chat systems, and have more contrasting colors to make it easier to read.

This goes back to the earlier discussion. I’m playing around with some styling changes and coliciting feedback but the front end will be very easy to change once everything is in place. I could even give several options on layouts. Some members want a more traditional message threading; some want a chat type threading; others want an email appearance. We could potentially have all 3. Keep the feedback coming!

3DSPaint is what started my life on the internet and jumpstarted a lot of my hobbies like gaming and writing. I’m sure everyone here loves this place as much as I do and doesn’t want to see it go down the dark path it’s been on. Hopefully HullBreach reads this and listens, for a better and more fun Paint. Let us know any other concerns in the comments.

Thank you for reading. I love all of you.

-Essay by Aaron “Thi500” Medina, special thanks to TulipsOfLove for the extra boost in confidence to write this.

(That’s a bold smilie.)