Agreed. For people who don't remember the specifics, the main misc section specifically was made private in March 2021, to lock non-established users out from even lurking it. That was done to stop wincel's antics, as he was constantly using endless alts to plaster porn all over the forum, much of it very vile porn at that. He'd been going totally off the rails with that behavior exceptionally badly ever since the end of the 2020 elections, and they needed to shut his mentally ill ass down somehow during a sale of the company. The only real recourse normal users had to avoid it was to disable auto-embedding of pics so you had to manually open every tab so wincel's shit with his 5k alts stayed hidden from you.
Then the new owners allowed it to be re-opened despite a good number of longtime users like myself heavily advising against the re-opening. They did this by having punicepts create a thread asking if we wanted it closed back down to the public or to stay open to all, a thread she made shortly after the re-opening in July 2022. We tried warning them about wincel and how it would just be more of the same garbage as before they closed it. We talked about how peaceful of a year 2021 was without the bs, even if it wasn't an ideal solution - it worked.
But noooooo, they just charged ahead like total morons and kept it open anyway. Wincel used about 100 of his alts to tip the scales into favoring staying open in that punicepts poll thread, which I also pointed out to her, but she was too fucking dense to hear any of it. Then, exactly as predicted, they ended up losing their precious forum just 2 years after the re-opening. Serves 'em right, tbh. Not my problem anymore now that they broke my misc addiction by deleting it.