[gunsch]

I happened to join Oink just before it fell over, and when it went down I managed to find some of the former members on a forum saying "hey, let's go build a replacement right away." I was only a budding PHP developer in high school, but managed to jump in with the right folks at the right time and learned a lot working on that site.

Couple stories from memory:

* What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back".

* I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know

* Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community.

* I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since.

* Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?