Is Romhacking.net Low-Key Shaming Alternative Sites It Beefed With?

Any Mention of Romhack Plaza is Automatically Hyperlinked to Old Reddit Drama Thread—and More

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1. Intro

A project thread of mine in the RHDN forums apparently contains some image hotlinks (which I should be fixing anyway) that became broken after a certain point in time, possibly in mid-2025.

To be clear, these images worked fine for a period of time.

But why did these end up being broken?

This is what I saw today when attempting to fix the images.

It looks like any link to (update: mention of) Romhack Plaza (RHP) is being auto-converted to instead point to a Reddit thread regarding some old drama between the two sites (which Romhack Plaza’s predecessor already addressed here).

Could this be an accident?

Or is RHDN refusing to squash its beef with one it deems as its competitor?

Let’s check another project thread of mine here.

Seems not.

We get that beef happens. But is that not something that the hacking community can overcome?

Is this the kind of culture that we want to see being set in our community?

2. Analysis

The original image (not hotlinked this time):

The original forum shortcode with hotlinked image URL:

[img width=256 height=224]https://romhackplaza.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/FF5r-IC-Disc1-English-translation-v0.01-by-clymax_027.png[/img]

The autoconverted result by RHDN:

[img width=256 height=224]https://[url=https://www.reddit.com/r/romhacking/comments/18xgc3b/romhacksorg_admin_sabotaged_romhackingnet/][url=https://www.reddit.com/r/romhacking/comments/18xgc3b/romhacksorg_admin_sabotaged_romhackingnet/][url=https://www.reddit.com/r/romhacking/comments/18xgc3b/romhacksorg_admin_sabotaged_romhackingnet/][url=https://www.reddit.com/r/romhacking/comments/18xgc3b/romhacksorg_admin_sabotaged_romhackingnet/]romhackplaza[/url][/url][/url][/url].org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/FF5r-IC-Disc1-English-translation-v0.01-by-clymax_027.png[/img]

Basically, RHDN’s automated script looks for:

romhackplaza

and auto-adds a hyperlink to the drama thread, like this:

romhackplaza

Based on further testing it was discovered that the URL shortcode is nested four deep in this case due to four edited submissions having been made.

That is to say, each additional edited submission results in one further level of nesting of the URL shortcode.

3. Validation

Should we test our hypothesis? A different thread is used.

“romhackplaza” was temporarily added at the end of the post.

The result is now hyperlinked as explained in the previous section.

The auto-added shortcode can be seen on re-editing the post.

This shows that the auto-conversion is still active to this day.

For what it’s worth, other variants were also tested but appear unaffected.

4. Another Discovery

It has since been reported to yours truly that you get a similar result if you try to mention Romhack.ing.

Here is a test:

And the result:

where

romhack.ing

became

Idiots that staged a hostile takeover.

in reference to an incident we previously covered here.

Crosspost on Twitter

Fun fact. Did you know that on the https://t.co/h9WUSZSbL0 forums, if you try to post a link to https://t.co/jTWxy9FXm9, it can get repointed to an old drama thread on Reddit? Not a good look for the hacking scene! https://t.co/SFgog82wpU

— clymax (@clymax) January 3, 2026

So, what do you think? Comment below, or come check us out on Discord.

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