[TIFU? PSA?] I killed off ZeroNet

LetsRaceBwoi

Well-Known Member
Alright; a bit of backstory:
Back in March, I created a search engine for ZeroNet dubbed "Bwoi". It went through two revisions, one which used poorly-written code and eventually turned out to be a big mess, and another "improved" version which was clean and easy to use.
...Or so I thought.

Back in April, when I published the "final" code for Rev.2, I didn't notice one critical bug which was still left in the code that I hadn't fixed; pages did not correctly display and the number was always completely wrong. I could have fixed it quite quickly, but it would have required a large code change and I couldn't be bothered to do it - I left it until later - and forgot all about it. When I published the change, I noticed a sudden - but slow - decrease in peers connecting to Bwoi. What was wrong? Why were they all leaving!? Was one of my results wrong? I went to check, and that's when I noticed the bug.
I decided to leave the rest of the work to Kaffiene, and shortly after discovering the bug I shut down the Bwoi project. The site is still up to this very day (albeit with 0 peers), but there's really no point in using it. The index is likely very outdated which means that half of the websites either don't work or aren't even there anymore.
I didn't notice at the time, but Bwoi was actually bringing in a lot of people (~1500 peers avg.) to the whole of ZeroNet. I never really noticed because I didn't really care - I just thought it was a coincidence and that I was just getting a lot of traffic because multiple servers were permanently hosting it (~15) so that if anything went wrong, they could be relied upon for an immediate backup. Well, I just looked at the peer count, and there have only been around 150-200 peers every time I looked.

Whoops.

TL;DR: I didn't notice that I was giving ZeroNet huge bonuses by creating a search engine, and now that I don't update it anymore nobody uses ZeroNet.

EDIT: Just checked back on Bwoi, got 8 connected peers. Still follows the aforementioned pattern of "less bwoi users, less zeronet users"
 
http://forum.freeso.org/threads/zeronet.1115/#post-17286
You can see from the posts there, some include the peers which you can see went up significantly. I actually think that Bwoi might have been the cause of ZeroNet's huge expansion, since the index was updated 1+ times a day meaning that new sites were easily put up there. The funny thing is that Kaffiene (a big rival of mine) actually attempted to copy my Google-esque style, subsequently making me release the improved Bwoi 2.0 - with a separate screen for search results, something never seen before on ZeroNet.
 
http://forum.freeso.org/threads/zeronet.1115/#post-17286
You can see from the posts there, some include the peers which you can see went up significantly. I actually think that Bwoi might have been the cause of ZeroNet's huge expansion, since the index was updated 1+ times a day meaning that new sites were easily put up there. The funny thing is that Kaffiene (a big rival of mine) actually attempted to copy my Google-esque style, subsequently making me release the improved Bwoi 2.0 - with a separate screen for search results, something never seen before on ZeroNet.
Nice !!
 
I read this and I was wondering for the first thirty minutes how you could have possibly killed off NetZero, because I'm a moron.
 
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