To whom it may concern,
I'm leaving this statement behind as the now former community manager of Cheeseformice.

The project has always been a volunteer-run project, and, as such, it does not have the potential to run without the involvement of a team of maintainers to keep it staying afloat. It was a heavy project, being maintained only by a single developer, for whom it was an unjustifiable, unrewarding workload, and any searches for secondary maintainers turned out futile as nobody with high enough potential to sustain the service wanted to take it on, which is why he departed the project.

This would not be a significant blow to Cheeseformice, everything was still operational and would continue to do so until it broke, however. The factor that spelled its demise was its owner and hoster, who, after having transferred the service from external servers to servers of his own company, ended up going AWOL and at some point ended up not paying the bills, betraying anyone who trusted the integrity of his services, corrupting Cheeseformice and ending up having all its data lost.

To any team that desires to assemble to take on a Cheeseformice project reborn from the ashes, I kindly invite you to do so. We are not going to turn you away if you come seeking our help, but we are not going to join you either. You won't have to build the service from the ground up, all the code is open-source and available, should anyone want to resume work on it.

To any CFM user reading this, I'll be blunt. Don't hold your breath for it. Nobody wanted to help when it was all we asked for, so why would anyone do it now when they have to do everything themselves?

- Syrius

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Jangerberry a dit :

never. tfm has closed api that allows for 3rd parties to recieve ingame data so sites like cfm and similar are not possible anymore.

Source? There was an API iteration that was shut down, but it was replaced by a new version and we kept using it to the very last day when the circumstances went outside our control, all the time being in direct contact with the admins.

I used to be the one to regularly update Sourdough with the protocol changes so we could fix our bots. This was waaay back when, there was no API hahaha. We had to reverse-engineer the client/server protocol. Every time there was an update it would break our stuff, and we'd have to figure out what changed and get our tools back online.

As I recall there was a lot bullshit drama on the CFM forums. I wasn't really active over there but you'd always hear stuff through the grapevine. For a while the site was making money, in fact I recall the TFM CCM being upset at the time that the head programmer nerd at CFM who made the map database was making more money from ads over there than the actual game was making. Wild times.

But some time went on, things changed, and I think the owner of CFM just had enough. From my perspective a lot of CFM forum mods were users who couldn't cut it as actual TFM staff, and banned users who had nowhere else to go. So they were constantly bothering Sourdough to get involved in their drama, and after a while it just wasn't worth it anymore. She split, the domain/hosting lapsed, and that was the end of CFM

This was around the same time that TFM went from a hobby project to a full-blown business, and they started replacing all the fan-made tools, bots, and minigames with official versions. Well, most of them anyway. I mean shit, I'm still hosting Map Crew stuff over a decade later. Luckily it's not a huge burden anymore as things have been stable for a while, but eventually it's like damn. At some point it's time to move on, but it's not always easy to make a clean break.

If I could go back in time, I'd ponder if it was doable to monetize any of my many creations... but luckily, the automation skills I first used in TFM are now being put to use maintaining an eBay store (and other marketplaces). The bots, the customer service experience I had as a staff member, many of my TFM experiences ended up being useful later on in ways I didn't expect. So it's all good.