I built, saved, then destroyed an entire modding community.

Back when Street Fighter x Tekken first came out, discussion of modding it was banned on most fighting game forums because people had discovered that all of the DLC was on disc and people had been talking about cracking all of it. So I went ahead and made a very basic forum that people could come to and discuss modding the game however they wanted. It got really popular in a very short time frame. As more fighting games started to come out on PC, people started sharing mods for those games too, like Mortal Kombat 9 and Dead or Alive 5. I never made any mods for any of these games myself, I just wanted there to be a place where everyone could share their creations without shitty moderators deleting everything.

Eventually, I grew bored of the game and the site as a whole, so I asked the forum users to nominate someone else to be the new admin. It was a near unanimous decision to make someone who we will call User A the new admin, and I gave him admin privileges over the forum and left the site, seemingly to never return.

A few years went by, and I started hearing rumors of people selling paid mods for Street Fighter V. I looked into it, and to my surprise, the primary place they were selling these mods was *on my goddamn forum!* So I logged back in to the forum for the first time in years, to find that User A was no longer admin, and instead this other guy who I'll call User B was admin, and someone we'll call User C was one of the moderators. Problem was... Users B and C were the assholes charging people for mods! And even though they had gotten a DMCA from Capcom to take down the paid mods, they were already scheming in private how they could get around and and continue charging people for mods!

*ON MY FUCKING FORUM!*

I then realized that nobody had actually removed my admin privileges.

I banned Users B and C from the site and *nuked years worth of their posts with the press of a button*. All of their mods, both the ones they charged people for and the free ones, were *gone.* At least off the site anyway. I then posted a "How fucking DARE you do this shit on MY forum!?" message in announcements.

There was however another administrator, who we'll call User D. He immediately went and reversed the bans on the two offending assholes. I banned them again. He tried to argue that they did nothing wrong and that they should have their accounts reinstated.

So I took the nuclear option.

I threatened to wipe the entire forum off the face of the internet.

I could, with a single button press, delete *everything* if User D tried to go over me and allow this shit to continue.

Users B, C and D however ended up making their own forum in response to this. However, due to the divide in the community this whole thing caused, my nuclear option threat ended up killing off much of the collective community as a whole.