Can someone tell me what happened? I used BlitzBasic back in the day and was happy to see, that this thing is still alive and got a successor ...
SO........ takes deep breath..
You probably know after BB Mark made Blitz Max, Max was really good, at this point the community I would say was at it's peek, the forums covered BB3D 2D and Max, and he had an active community for all of those languages, over time most people moved to Max but those other languages still had active posters, and those posters often took things done in Max and redid them in B3D and 2D it was a good time.
Mark then made what I would argue is his crowning achievement in Monkey and this is where the shit just hits the fan, First of all the name, I still want to know what drug he was on when he thought something with such an insane search term would be a good fit, you it was near impossible for ages to find anything monkey related without being flooded with actual bloody monkey results, the next major mistake was splitting the community in two with a new utterly garbage site with some of the worst design iv seen in my life it was a total mess, and I and others were constantly posting suggestions and requests to try and get him to change it lot of us even offered our help free of charge, he eventually got a new site design which was still not brilliant but it was better.
So at this point the community is now split, the monkey side is a fraction of the numbers on the blitz community, but both communities felt this split hard, the blitz side felt abandoned by Mark, and the monkey side felt shit about having so few posters and missed the thriving feel of the old forums, but things were improving slightly over time as the monkey forums grew.
Mark then made his final colossal mistake and split the now tiny community again, with moneky 2, at this point a massive amount of the now tiny community just refused to move, Monkey 1 has a small but active development team now and its in the form of Cerberus with a better website, Monkey 2 is in the toilet.
Mark, You should have never split your community so many times, or at all, You should have paid a decent web developer to overhaul your site so it could handle all the different toolsets, and you would still be making money today and you would still have a thriving and addicted fan base.
Thank you for this recap. So Cerberus X is the remaining pice, thanks for pointing me in that direction. I was allways wondering where all the community has gone. Even the once very active german forum blitz-forum seem to be not very active now and i was allways wondering why there is no Monkey related content. A bit sad ... Basically i learned coding with Blitz3D back then - bought the Language and the only german book there was :D