what happened to bzoink?

[addyallure]

so, if any of y'all knew me, or barely knew me rather, i was known as addyallure on bzoink. i joined the site in march of last yr and basically recruited other ppl on the site from another site called spacehey (a revival of the og myspace) via forum posts and bulletins:

forum.spacehey.com/topic?id=102579

i was excited 2 join the site bc i'm pretty much interested in retro websites, and bc quizilla was huge w tweens and teens and in the indie internet scene in the 2000s, i wanted 2 find another similar website that continued the legacy quizilla left behind, and then i came across bzoink, which came out a yr after quizilla's release. hell, i was even able 2 confirm w the owner of bzoink that he was close friends w the owner of quizilla.

after joining the site, i had lots of fun taking surveys and reading different forums and poetry pieces. but unfortunately, bc i have been so busy as a college student w a part-time job, i 4got abt bzoink, until recently, when i decided 2 catch up on bzoink and what i've missed, only 2 b greeted w a blank page that said the yrs bzoink was active from and a few heart emojis/emoticons.

so, i am curious, what the hell ever happened 2 bzoink? if any1 has any answers, plz lmk asap.

ilu and i'll ttyl!! bye bye!!

[another-sky]

Hey I remember seeing you on Bzoink! Glad you joined over here. Andy made an announcement in the forums in January about how Bzoink wasn't making money anymore and was no longer able to support itself.  I think he also mentioned that there were some tech/web dev reasons for shutting it down; makes sense seeing how drastically the internet has changed in the 21 years since Bzoink was created.  Kinda seems like it was becoming a bigger and bigger chore to keep it updated and running, and it shut down on February 1st.

[andy]

Kelly is correct. It was just time. I held out at least 10 years longer than I should have and honestly I have no regrets. I'm happy the community was able to find a new home here.

Internet laws are constantly changing, both in the US and elsewhere. Getting more strict, and more "insane" in my opinion. Also the technology running the internet continues to evolve. Bzoink's code was old and outdated and required an almost entire recode just to be able to move the site to new and more affordable service providers. Most web hosts won't even support the versions of software it was running on anymore. On top of that, to make the site modern and have any hopes of supporting itself again it needed a complete redo in every sense, not just the code. There's ways to do that and keep the retro feel, but it's still a complete redo. I don't have the singular focus I once had to be able to really buckle down and achieve that. I'm a middle aged man now with lots of stupid and mundane things cluttering my mental energy. Haaaahh.

Glad you all made Bzoink a part of your lives for however long or short.


Just for the fun of it, here's a book I recently found from 2007 that talks about how scary Bzoink is:

books.google.com/books?id=FGhXm4Nq9nIC&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=bzoink&source=bl&ots=IVkCEYOT6k&sig=ACfU3U2EEh-n5Wxe3oeMuqrV9YwXHQoLmg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjeteuOsbqEAxUXHNAFHUgiD5Y4KBDoAXoECAYQAw#v=onepage&q=bzoink&f=false