o355 Games was my unblocked games website that’s somehow really popular. Search “unblocked flash games” on Google. See, where’s my site? (read to the end to find out) You’re probably asking how I ended up with a really popular unblocked games site. Time for a bit of history.
Back in 2014, unblocked games were a huge thing at my school. Competition was left, right, forward, backward, upward, downward – things were intense. Name copying accusations were thrown around like nobody’s business, and of course, my old o355’s Place site was constantly SQL hacked because I had no password on the database. I actually called one of the companies that SQL hacked it and that…uh…well didn’t work.
I decided to make a Weebly site for unblocked games, but the site didn’t do so well. Looks like I had lost the competition. Eventually the unblocked games surge faded, and I left the site to collect a lot of dust.
Then in 2016, I logged into my Weebly admin panel and found that o355 Games was doing 500 page hits a week, 200 visitors a week. Clearly, I’m a 4D chess master since I won that unblocked games battle.
Another two years later, I checked the site panel, and saw that the site was still growing! In January 2018 it was doing 2,000 page hits a week and 500 visitors a week – and in May it was doing 2,500 page hits a week and 700 visitors a week.
Since the site was really growing, over the summer of 2018 I took a few days to update the site, fulfilling a backlog of game requests from many years, and cleaning things up a lot. I even tried to put AdSense on the site to earn some money, but the application got denied.
As 2018 went on the site continued to grow quite nicely – 3500 page hits a week and 700 visitors a week. As the 2018-2019 school year ended, the site was doing ~5000 page hits a week, and ~1000 visitors a week.
And then, well, late 2019 decided to happen. At the start of the 2019-2020 school year the site was doing about the same as last year, until I started noticing that the site was growing at an insane pace. In early October I was getting about 10,000 hits a week and ~2500 visitors a week. Where’d all that traffic come from? Not sure. Late October 2019? 15,000 hits a week and 3300 visitors a week.
As time went on through the 2020 school year, o355 Games kept growing and growing – reaching a record of about 25,000 hits in one day, and over 100,000 hits in a week. The list for requested games got very long.
Until…
Coronavirus happened! With everyone at home without filtering, site traffic absolutely tanked. So there wasn’t much motivation to update the website anymore.
And then, out of nowhere, Weebly decided to ban my account around April 20, 2020 (maybe someone was high and banned my account on accident, we’ll never know), without any correspondence. The lack of game request form submissions should have alerted me that something was wrong – but I didn’t notice because I was getting so few submissions after coronavirus happened, and I was instead getting bombarded with college spam. (now that May 1st has rolled around my inbox is eerily quiet)
Today (May 1, 2020), I tried logging into Weebly to make an archive of the site for server backups. I kept getting error E313 when logging in, and after some quick Googling it means that I was banned for violating the ToS. Probably something to do with rehosting copyrighted content 🤔
(what this also meant is that all my other Weebly sites went down as well, so I have to figure out something to preserve them)
And that’s the very anti-climatic end to o355 Games. I hope to upgrade my VPS sooner rather than later with more storage space, so hopefully I can put a full copy of the website on my server soon. I’ll see if I can get in touch with Weebly to reinstate the account, but this will likely be to no avail because rehosting copyrighted content is probably against the ToS.
