This is an oral history by Warpez, Liminal Archives’ founder.
I must preface this by saying that I sank roughly 7-8 months of my life into this project, and I both interacted with the community on the server and worked on the site for probably a collective hour or two on a daily basis, so naturally I have to exclude a lot of details. I also would prefer for this to be more of an overview rather than a biography of sorts, but there’s not really any helping it in this situation.
I made the site in march and got Ev and Stretchster on board about 3 days after that — they were pretty key to the success of the site throughout my time there. I had made the Backrooms Tech Support server by mid-April but it, along with the site started getting popular probably by may. After that, the site kinda just grew exponentially with every passing week. A couple incidents happened during this time, and although i couldn’t list them all, i can say that probably the most notable one (only to me, and for good reason) is the impeachment. Around July to August, depending on who you ask, came what we who current stand on the outside of the original community may consider a downward spiral; the success of the project brought along with it a lot of the ideals of this generation of the internet; some examples being banning any mention of the word ‘rape’ as well as ‘retard’ and what have you. This time especially hit me quite hard; as previously mentioned I spent a lot of time interacting with the community and building the site but the way I and my friends talked and composed ourselves on the server seemed to conflict with the the way the rest of staff, and a sizeable part (10-20% at first) of the community, wanted me to.
As such I seemed to punished for every message that I sent, causing my motivation to spend time on the project and community to deteriorate over time. Eventually, this hit a boiling point and it was quite hard going on the server at a point and as such I decided to create a sister server for some of my closest friends to talk on. This sister server had a couple names but I remember it most fondly as ‘Hole 2’. On that server I found it quite nice to relax and just chat the way I intended and somewhat similarly to how we would’ve conversed back in the early days. On that server I’d invited probably 10-15 people and most notable among those to me now was Vince.
Eventually after I had realised that I no longer even had the motivation to work on the wiki, something that I had always loved and looked forward to doing (one could even say that that was what gave me a purpose in life), in combination with the fact that the main community were no longer people that I enjoyed interacting with, I decided to call it quits on the 30th of November. I resigned in what could well have seemed in response to something Ev had told me — though it really wasn’t — and left ownership of both the Discord servers and the site in his capable hands.
On the 3rd of December, I opened up Discord to find that all of the Backrooms servers that weren’t owned by me missing from my server list (you can probably tell where this is going). It turns out that the staff had banned all the members of the Hole 2 server (safe for, to my knowledge, Vince) for the given reasons of racism, homophobia, and more to that extent (although this can be immediately disregarded as false if you know for one that I am literally black and that probably half of the members there were part of the LGBT community). With this they made a quite large announcement, headlining it as the banning of a group led specifically by me, even though I was not only not even the most active member there, but also that none of the “evidence” they gave were messages sent by me, and those from other members that did seem even somewhat damning had been sent in other sister servers that I didn’t own (and among those I think I wasn’t active in any). A couple weeks after, though the dates and details of things that happened proceeding this aforementioned big event aren’t burned as vividly into my mind, Evfist turned over ownership to someone called Etoile.
He later did admit that he had done it in part to spite me, and for that I can’t really blame him; I probably would have done the exact same thing or similar in his position knowing and believing what he did. From there I kind of spiralled into a depression of long nights and self harm (and, worst of all, anime) as I tried to find a creative endeavour I could add to the same way I did with the site in order to try and fill the void but that time isn’t all too well remembered in my mind. That brings us to today, where now whenever someone to any extent reuses, even in a positive light and even with credit, something that I created, I feel strong feelings of hatred and disgust, which is about as fun as you’d expect. All in all, even if it didn’t end too well and even if I’m left with it all way too clear in my mind, I would consider it too be at the least a positive learning experience, even if that is a lesson in never trusting anyone ever again in my life. It was fun while it lasted at the least.
