John Mosley

John Mosley (also known as: ShadowArmadyl, irix, Mosley, inpace, aokod, admin) is a freelance software developer, forum administrator and moderator that has participated in several communities over the years. From 2014 to 2021, he was an Administrator of the Total Freedom Minecraft server, partially responsible for bringing it back online after CreeperSeth wiped the physical server. In 2017 he created the geteso forum and has since acted as its webmaster (using the name "admin") while continuing the development of the esoTalk forum software under the name esoBB. He has created several other online communities while also moderating others, such as the Schizoid Arena Discord server.

Early life

Mosley was born on June 6th, 2003 and lives in Tulsa Oklahoma. He began using the Internet from a young age and participated in several online communities despite being grossly immature for them. John Mosley is not his real name, although users of Total Freedom have been psy-opped into believing that to be the case.

His earliest surviving presence on the Internet is from a Flash-based web application he created in 2011 called Flash Fireworks, which generated firework-like animations using template images.

esoTalk

The esoTalk support forum was made public in late 2008. During early 2011, Mosley created an account on the esoTalk support forum and created his own instance of the esoTalk forum software a couple of weeks after. After January 2012, esoTalk gamma (a complete rewrite of the forum software) was released, although Mosley continued to maintain his forum that was, by that time, being used by the players on an old Minecraft server. This forum was deleted in 2014.

By March 2018, Mosley forked version 1.0.0b2 of the forum software and purchased the domain "esotalk.net" to create esoForum, a web forum originally adopted by a small community. The forum was initially named esoTalk however was changed to esoForum at the request of Toby Zerner, one of the developers of the original project. Sometime around February 2021, Mosley invited Adolf Hitler to the forum, along with several other members of the Total Freedom community. Shortly after, the forum received a Great Influx of users from 4chan and other websites that led to a significant increase in the size of its community. Following the increase in its popularity, the forum was renamed from esoForum to geteso.

Many of the forum's "oldfags" were real-life friends of Mosley that became introduced to the forum in some way or another. Billiam_Kush and eso were both introduced to the forum through Mosley. Others, such as shrimp and amougies, joined the forum from other communities, such as Total Freedom. Adolf Hitler introduced Akefu Brewer to the forum a few weeks after he first joined.

Minecraft servers

Mosley started playing the video game Minecraft in 2011 after being referred to the game from a player on RuneScape. In 2013, he created his first server, which ran on PlotMe (a land management plugin for the CraftBukkit server software) and consisted of a small community. Later that year, he began playing on FreedomOP, a Minecraft server similar to Total Freedom, and shortly thereafter on Total Freedom. Mosley became an administrator on Total Freedom sometime around October 2014 according to the forum account on the original ProBoards forum after being TPaS'd (Telnet Picks a Super) by SpecLeader. He became an administrator on FreedomOP during that same year and made code contributions to the Minecraft plugin responsible for most of the server's functionality, a fork of TotalFreedomMod. Mosley was responsible for several additions to the server, such as the adoption of CoreProtect (a block logging plugin) for restoring damage made to people's builds instead of the Logstick, a feature of TotalFreedomMod that was later removed.

TatsuCraft

In 2015, Mosley became an administrator on TatsuCraft Freedom, a TotalFreedom-esque freedom server that used a fork of the TotalFreedomMod plugin. For some time he made code contributions to the fork of the plugin for the TatsuCraft server (TatsuCraftMod) headed by Yoshi41023 (also known as Marth). Later that year, all of the server's data was lost due to a billing error with the server host, OVH. For a short while the server returned, however it was temporarily closed by the server owner (ImALuckyGuy) due to OVH having closed his account and has since been offline. After the server closed for the last time, several members from the TatsuCraft community migrated to Chromium, a server owned and operated by Mosley, which at the time served as a freedom server running the TatsuCraftMod fork.

On August 31 2015verification needed the Chromium Minecraft server was partially destroyed due to a data loss incident, while the website and forum remained active. The server was brought back online using a month-old backup and continued until 2017. Aedificium is considered to be a direct successor to Chromium, as the spawn world (formerly known as the "adminworld") is derived from the old server and continues to be updated to this day.

Total Freedom

Ever since being made Super Admin on Total Freedom in late 2014, Mosley continued to make contributions to the server by way of suggestions regarding the server's functionality and its administration. In 2016 he was made Telnet Admin and subsequently Telnet Clan Admin during the time in which MarkByron (server owner) used the MultiPlay hosting service and its proprietary server management application, ClanForge. During this period, Mosley made minor code contributions to the TotalFreedomMod plugin by improving its locale and fixing bugs with various commands.

In early 2020, Mosley was temporarily suspended from the rank of Senior Admin for trolling on the server by setting the spawnpoint inside of a white cube and then later vandalizing one of the other spawns. On October 2020, then-owner CreeperSeth deleted all of the server's files in a fit of rage. A couple of hours later, a Discord server was created by Fionn and others in order to collect the rest of the community. Mosley purchased the domain tfreedom.com to serve as a temporary address for the new server until the original domain totalfreedom.me was reconfigured by MarkByron, who retained control of it during the time in which CreeperSeth acted as server owner. Ryan Wild offered to use his VPS hosting service Superior Networks to host the server as an opportunity to gain control over the community and then had the Discord server transferred to his account.

Relations between Mosley and the rest of the Total Freedom staff soured after geteso began to pick up popularity and many new users on the forum targeted the Total Freedom forum. On March 2022, the Total Freedom forum's reset password controller (which used Flarum at the time) was spammed, thus leaking the e-mail addresses of numerous accounts on the forum and flooding their inboxes with password reset requests. Mosley was banned from the Total Freedom Discord server for no apparent reason whilst retaining his rank of Senior Admin, but was eventually banned from the Minecraft server on April 21 2022 because of the content on geteso. Two months later, Mosley and Corona used a disposable alt account service to spam the public chat and private messages of players on the Minecraft server for hours on end, leading to a state of outrage in the community and so numerous players who were believed to be part of the raids were banned.

Due to a dwindling playerbase, Total Freedom began experiencing neglect in terms of its security. On July 21 2023, Ryan Wild shut down the server temporarily because "there have been no real reasons to keep this community running [...] as we've seen declining player counts and the increase in poor behavior targeting others in the community..." which, three days later, was reversed. On August 17 2023, the forum and Minecraft server were attacked by exploiting a bug which enabled the exploiter to gain root access to the physical server, thus leading to its shut-down the day after.

UnraveledMC

Mosley became an administrator on UnraveledMC (formerly known as ImmaFreedom) in late 2016 until the server was shut down on November 24 2017. After the server shut down, the domain was redirected to Aedificium (then known as shadow.ga) for one week until the DNS expired. On May 1 2020, the server was revived as part of an idea between Panther, Pramire and Mosley after purchasing the domain unraveledmc.com. The server ran successfully for several weeks on end, at one point becoming more popular than TotalFreedom, before activity dropped off due to a number of issues within the server's administration. Over time, different members of the server's administration became split between two "groups." This division reached its height when bobscog was removed from the Executive team, which shortly thereafter led to a feud about the general direction of the server until Mosley gave ownership of the domain to Pramire and was subsequently removed from the server in exchange for access to the server files.

UnraveledMC rebranded to "Darkstone" shortly after Panther and Pramire took lead of the server. On January 25 2023, Mosley re-purchased the unraveledmc.com and transferred it to Paldiu (former TotalFreedom developer) who, along with other former admins, has been working on a project to revive the server.

Gallery

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  Mosley meeting Akefu Brewer on Omegle.