11th May 2019 – 13th January 2023
Read on, or return to the previous chapter, or the Home Page.
Excerpt
On January 9th 2023, Plotfactory.com went down and the founder, J, disappeared off the face of the internet.
While trying to recover access to their precious works from the downed website, the users attempted to locate and reach out to J. However, they discovered J’s absence might be down to something far more sinister than a ghosting.
A quick recap: Where in the world is J?
We found out in ‘Chapter 1: Website Down!’ that Plot Factory (plotfactory.com, or ‘PF’ for short,) went down on the 9th of January 2023, and that the website’s creator, named ‘J’ in this chronicle, was nowhere to be found. During those first few days, the community left behind sought to find out what had happened to the website that stored all of their writing, and where the ‘Grand Master’ had disappeared to.
While ‘The Hero’ developed a workaround that allowed the user base to bypass the DNS resolution using the host files on their computers, another group of authors drove into the accounts and social media J left behind. One of them, ‘The Firebrand,’ uncovered a potential lead that suggested J was in prison, arrested for a felony crime.
Congregating now in the newly found ‘The Plot Thickens’ server on Discord, the users carefully catalogued everything new they learned about the missing Wizard of Oz, partly hoping they’d find something that would prove the ‘J-ailbird Theory’ incorrect. However, a decent chunk of the ‘oldies,’ the user base who had been on the OG PF Discord server since its inception, did not count on a coincidence between J-Ailbird and PF J being two separate people.
Nope, while a little shocked by the prosecuted crimes purported to be J’s, there was not a soul willing to bat for him or defend his character. People deemed his people skills and management of people atrocious, and his reluctance to take accountability for his poor decisions frustrated many people in (and into leaving) the community. In short, this was a man with an enormous ego and a massive paranoia for those who worked with him on the PF server, some of which likely contributed both to the ‘heat death of the server’ and possibly had a knock-on effect that led to Plot Factory’s outage.
As, by the time of Plot Factory’s first, month-long outage between 9th January – 3rd February 2023, there was no longer a “team” at Plot Factory (if there had ever been one at all.) It appears that all the maintenance and management of the site was done by J and J alone.
How J killed the Plot Factory Discord Server
In ‘Chapter 1’, I detailed how J founded Plot Factory. You can read about how J came up with the idea for PF in his own words here but, from what I can tell, there was nothing cynical or insidious about his idea or how he developed it. He genuinely seems to have been a man with an (admittedly good) idea and purposefully sought writers in the ‘r/worldbuilding’ Reddit community and took a lot of what his beta testers told him onboard. Many of the features built into the website, such as the use of universes and tracking chapters/word count based on characters, were suggestions made by the community.
I say again: I firmly believe that Plot Factory has always been, and probably still is, a genuine business. J is not a conman and PF was not a scam. Despite his many faults, which will be outlined below, J maintained this business for the first three-or-so years of the website’s existence, consistently making improvements and responding to bug reporting.
However, his activity dropped off significantly in 2022 and none had seen not seen hide nor hair of him for a few months by the time of the outage. That everyone’s mind immediately went to the possibility that J might have abandoned them, rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt, demonstrates how sceptical the client base for Plot Factory had become.
It was not always this way.
The big bang: The discord server is created
J founded the ‘Official Plot Factory Discord’ (i.e. the OG server) on 11th May 2019, about a year after Plot Factory’s beta stage ended and the website went live. There are very few surviving messages from that time as you will soon learn, the original #General chat was hidden by J. At the time of the OG server’s creation though, the community responded well and it became a place for authors to come together to collaborate on projects and partake in challenges.
It was not J who led the ‘community-based activities’ within the server, though. From what I can tell, these were largely posted and handled by a moderator, who I will call ‘L.’ They handled the ‘fun stuff’ on the server, posting the prompts and challenges.
According to one user, who was around during the OG server’s genesis:
“[L] interacted with [J] like they were friends, but I didn’t get the vibe that they knew each other IRL.”
Indeed, the last post by L dates to 19th May 2021, and she does not appear to be a member of the server any longer. There was never a special announcement that they were stepping down as a moderator for the server nor leaving the company, as far as I can tell. Their affiliation with Plot Factory simply ceased after the 19th May.
L was not the only mod, though.
Until May 2021, J had a legion of other moderators who worked within community to create events, alert the authors to various external writing competitions, and generally providing pastorial support for the users.
Among these mods was S, a very popular and active member of the server. Aside from joining L in posting prompts and challenges for everyone to keep their writing skills sharp, S would also support the writers’ development by reading and providing feedback on the #share-a-snippet channel. They were also effective at defusing tension between users, especially those upset by said feedback provided.
The above-post is one such example, which involved the same interation where L made their last post. Truth be told, S was especially beloved (and gifted) for providing critical, yet well-appreciated, feedback as one user would later recount:
“[N]obody will be as good at critiquing work as [S] was. His advice helped so so many people and it’s really a shame [J] couldn’t see how amazing he was.”
The OG discord enjoyed 3 glorious years with little to no drama or conflict. A few other mods – including one called ‘Y’ – kept the membership interaction ticking over quite nicely, allowing J to focus purely on the technical side of the website.
Through discussions of a veteran at the old Plot Factory Official discord, I learned the following (quoted rather than screencaped, as this was a PM conversation between us):
[J] was never really interested in running an actual community, from what I saw. When he still had a mod team, he would come in and chat sometimes, and he was good about responding to bug reports. But beyond that, no, he needed other [mods] to be there
And, to his credit, J was very responsive in these days to anything posted in the #bug-reporting channel and would usually provide context for why a bug was occurring, while also occassionally coming in to offer writers feedback as and when he found an oppotunity.
All in all, the discord appeared to be a well-oiled machine. This beauteous status quo, however, would all come to an abrupt end in May 2021, the same month the moderating team for the OG server mysteriously went silent.
The supernova: There is no “j” in team
In May 2021, there was a bad – and very public – blow-up between J and his moderators. This resulted in J hiding the original General chat and kicking the mods from the server.
It is unclear what started the ‘drama’, though a well-informed user who was there at the time and knew the moderators in question provided the following information. I wish to stress that is a third-party account, though they cited one of the mods involved, as they knew her personally.
[J] actually created [the drama] himself. He was […] trying to triangulate the mod team and pit them against each other, and then had a meltdown when one of the mods realized it and called it out. Then, instead of kicking just that mod, he kicked/banned the entire team… didn’t say why, but presumably, it was because they all knew what he was doing.
Interestingly enough, the exchange involving S, L and a user that I cited above was allegedly, (and you’ll be hearing that word a lot,) the inciting incident.
I will post it again in full:
A fine example of conflict resolution, right? Well, apparently, J messaged Y off the back of exchanges like the above and “tried to get [him] to say that S was personally attacking users in his critiques.”
All very ‘Mean Girls,’ isn’t it?
Taken off-guard, Y told the other mods – presumably that he felt J was stirring the pot – leading to S calling him out in a DM, effectively telling J that if he has a problem “say it to my face.”
Still, while this event was supposed why J chucked out the entire mod team, this was just the straw — there was entire basket-case of nonsense already on the camel’s back.
The true breakdown in the relationship between J and his moderation team appears to have centred around the creation of a separate server. Members included some of the mods as well as members of the PF community as a whole, which J did not take kindly to. According to my source, this server was either a minecraft or RPG-focused server, and;
There was never [a] server meant to compete with the PF one, or [backtalk J]
Which is what he assumed and couldn’t be convinced otherwise
However, the fact several mods had access to a server – for whatever reason – that he was not a part of, fed into J’s paranoia. And it most certainly seems to have been paranoia. For whatever reason, J appears to have sincerely believed that the mod team were conspiring against him and, to put it bluntly, did not work well with others.
Now, you may be thinking, “Hold on! This isn’t fair – we don’t have J’s side of the story.”
Well, actually, we do.
The following exchange still survives in the new #General, as one user [The Harbinger of Doom] does not hide their ire from J, where he outlined his reasons for removing his entire moderation team:
Figure 2.10: The discussion between J and another user.
Make of this what you will, but it lines up with everything my source recounted to me.
Needless to say, the Harbringer of Doom was correct, and the OG Server never truly recovered from the removal of its OG mod team.
The heat death: All activity slows down
While J continued to be fairly active in the server with the other members of the community throughout the summer of 2021, the removal of the old guard appears to have left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.
J made a half-hearted attempt to recruit a new team, as can be seen in the #General chat, after the old one was hidden:
But it never went anywhere.
Henceforth, J was the sole moderator for Plot Factory’s Official Discord server, steadily, the light began to fizzle out.
J continued to be fairly responsive to queries regarding the website up until the beginning of 2022, when his interactions started to drop off. No one really knew why or questioned it, though it may have been related to a bit of drama that occurred around 18 months before the website outage of 2023.
Then, come the autumn and winter of 2021, J’s posts slowly began to reduce. For context, in 2021, J made a total of 762 messages (out of ~4,200 total) in the server; in 2022, it was only 57 (out of ~1,600). True, the server was quieter, but J’s absences were becoming longer and more apparent, including ghosting the entire server between May 2022 to November 2022.
This included an instance where a user had pinged him for assistance regarding their membership in September 2022 but received no response for two months:
Incidentally, the above exchange was J’s final message to the Official Plot Factory Discord server.
So, on that fateful January day, when Plot Factory went down, there were no benefits-of-the-doubt to be given.
If anything, the people were kicking themselves for not seeing something like this coming. What can be said, though, is that the sudden and shocking downing of PF drew the bemused users out of the woodworks to descend on the ol’ discord and air out all their dirty laundry.
Figure 2.14: A collection of reactions and regrets.
After hours of silence, no response from PF’s socials and emails to the ‘contact@plotfactory.com’ address bouncing back, the community saw no other option but to go ‘a hunting for ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’ and his white hot air balloon.
With few other options, the community began what can only be described as ‘Google Dumpster Diving’ in order to try and track down J through other means. A few people found his email address and began trying to reach him from there, while others did name searches to see whether he had been active on any of his other socials. From what people gathered, the last time his digital footprint could be picked up was on the 9th of December 2022, about a month after his last post to the Discord community.
That was when one user managed to find something troubling: an indication that J might currently be in prison.
But does J-ail bird = Plot Factory guy?
The following is speculation, but it’s all the Plot Factory Community had.
To cut a long, long journey down the rabbit hole that is the Google Dumper Diving the community did short, an individual matching J’s name, appearance and approximate age was found – as an inmate in a prison in Nevada, having been booked – drum roll people – in December 2022.
Further investigation by one particularly tenacious user – nicknamed here ‘The Firebrand’ – uncovered a court case as well in the public records.
Everything began to click into place: the lack of interaction from the summer of 2022 onwards and J’s disappearance from all his old accounts from November/December 2022 could all be because he had been charged, convicted and was now sitting in prison, serving his time.
Please note: The Firebrand has always stated this is speculation.
All I will say is that it is a felony crime involving two individuals. I feel I cannot say anymore than that and, frankly, I do not wish to delve into the details.
You can look for the details yourself and make your own judgements.
What I will say is that the man who committed this crime has the same name as J is commonly known on social media. Granted, it’s a fairly common name, (as the userbase found out when they were looking for a way to contact him,) but he was also the same age as ‘The Plot Factory guy’ (early 30s.) Suffice it to say, the stomachs of the PF membership quickly turned.
Together with the established timeline, this became the prelevant theory.
A few attempts were made after this to try and verify either way whether this was the same man, but understandably, none of the individuals concerned – such as the named attorney or possible family members – ever replied to messages and emails. Completely understandable, given the circumstances, but no less frustrating for the dozens (even hundreds) of now incredibly irate Plot Factory users.
The Wizard of Oz wasn’t behind the curtain.
No one was.
By all accounts, there was no one other than J working on Plot Factory. It was a one-man operation with, at most, a couple of people working the now-inaccessible bug reporter and contact@ email, which was still down as mentioned earlier.
Many chose to make memes and jokes to keep their spirits up, but truly everyone was disheartened, especially when they realised that it was incredibly likely that if this was J, many of the services that were used to run Plot Factory (including the NameBright domain and Cloudflare/AWS servers) would not only have expired wiped by the time he was in any position to paid the bills.
With no one coming forward to explain what the heck was going on, the Plot Factory discord turned their attention to regaining access to the website and recovering their works before any potential wipes.
Even if this outrage hadn’t been intentional – or related to a failure to pay the domain bill – this incident shows that J was perfectly happy to let the site go down for hours without warning, explanation, or maybe even noticing. This also implies to me that allowing the domain to expire was not the result of malicious intent, but incompetence.
This was the opinion of the official Plot Factory discord members once news of the website being down spread:
Immediately, one of the more “techie” members speculated the domain had lapsed.
The fact that everyone’s mind immediately went to the possibility that J might have abandoned them, rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt, demonstrates how sceptical the client base for Plot Factory had become.
Again, I wish to stress that it has not been confirmed that Plot Factory J and ‘Jailbird’ J were the same man, hence why I have not given any specific details about the case as I do not wish to accuse PF J of something he might not have done.
However, this is all an incredible coincidence to top off all the other ones the community had uncovered, and it would explain why J had failed to make an appearance on the old discord server or anywhere else for about a month before the domain expired. Yet that’s exactly what it is — a coincidence.
And, to be frank, it would (and will) be very easy for J to wipe the OG Discord to hide the evidence, should he desire. In fact, many of us almost have accepted it as inevitable, considering what happened last time with the mods.
So, until J comes out of the woodworks to explain where he has been and why he allowed Plot Factory to fall to pieces from January 9th onwards, this remains the leading theory within the community built upon the back of this business.
Interlude: A quick message for you, J
But I will say this:
As of writing this blog post, J-ailbird will have been deemed to have served his time (i.e. released) on Good Friday. i.e. Friday 7th April, 2023.
So, J, if you’re reading this and you want to set the record straight, either by writing an official apology for what you put everyone through from 9th January – 3rd Ferburary 2023.
You owe the community an explanation. Not an excuse, but a bone fide “apology“I’m sorry.” Take full responsibility for the events that took place from 9th January – 3rd Ferburary 2023 and apologise for what everyone went through.
Moreover, while some users have received refunds for their subscriptions, via bank disputes or your (doubtless frazzled) helper running the contact@ now that’s back up, not everyone has. You should, without reservation, refund every paid member of Plot Factory at the very least for the affected month.
If you make an apology – or statement, whatever – I would link it here. This blog series is listed as ‘Version 1’ for a reason. It is incredibly important to me that I do represent you fairly, and – thanks to your absence – all I have are straws. If you wish to put it in your own words, go for it.
This series isn’t stopping, either. I will continue it regardless of whether you do right by everyone or disappear into the aether for eternity.
But, rest assured, henceforth you won’t be a character. This is our story, not yours.
This is the last you will be mentioned.
That’s all for now.
Thankfully, when it came to regaining, our ‘The Hero’ had found a workaround, ensuring that the community had a means to recover the only thing that really mattered — their writing.
At least, that’s what they thought.
Cliffhanger: The backdoor closes
On Monday 13th January, new members of The Plot Thickens who tried to use the workaround to recover their works were greeted not with the landing page, but a dreaded 500 Server Error.
After a few attempts by others to access the website by the workaround, they called upon “A Hero” to ask what they thought might be the problem. He took a look and came back with his haunting conclusion:
All hearts dropped.
That was it!
For those fortunate enough to have arrived to the crime scene early, most were able to retrieve their life work and book it from the website. However, it’s worth noting that even among these people, there were still members who had yet to complete backing up their notes – and plenty who were only now just discovering that the website was down and wandering into the community searching for answers only to learn all hope was lost.Plot Factory was (likely) dead.
As the week of the 13th January began, The Plot Thickens community entered what can only be described as limbo.
The Week of Wilderness had begun – the point where I, your humble host, shambled in from the cold and into the furnace of fury that was the silent majority of the Plot Factory community.
Coming soon! – Chapter 3: A Week in the Wilderness – Servers Down! Lost the Plot, The Plot Factory Chronicles (13th January – 19th January 2023)
Scarlettpeony Writes 