I remember the old days, in fact I recognize a lot of these people as people I bought and sold from. I remember buying complete Xboxes at the pawn shop and parting them out and trading for all kinds of weird things. I remember some guy selling straight razors and having a good business go of it. I also recall when AppleGuru got raided and the fallout he took from that. There was someone else too who had made a water-cooled X360, I think he may have even been a mod, but he was selling backups and got pinched.
I also remember a lot of the old mods and how cool they were on one hand, but incredibly strict on the other. You played by the rules and you were good, you didn't and they let you know. Braham2 used to be my personal favorite, Shanafan was awful cocky, but he got the job done.
I have always wondered why after all this time X-S doesn't purge all the banned accounts or unban them like was done at some other sites after a period of time.
I'll take my chances saying this but I incurred the wrath of HSD, we had gone back and forth about a few things and I made a couple open comments about my disappointment with the direction the site was taking, especially at the first advances in X360 modding. I stand by my feelings then and I still stand by them now. We went from a site that was 100% don't discuss piracy, etc to new developments about how people could play their copied games and discussions about where to get games to copy. etc. I said I wasn't impressed with C4E's work because it hadn't gotten to the root of what I felt X-S really wanted, which was an open system ala the original Xbox. (We finally have that now which is why I'm back, I'm curious if it's time to hang up my original Xbox and move forward). 100% confident I was banned for this. Considering this took place probably 4 or 5 years ago I like to think I'm okay to share this. If I wake up banned again, I guess I know why.
It's sad to see the news page updated so infrequently now, heck, the forum still doesn't allow searching. If I was new looking for something, I'd skip this site entirely just for the lack of knowing what useful information is out there and new information isn't updated.
Closing thoughts here, I don't believe X-S is any sort of moneymaker, it's big, time consuming, and falling behind. I would really like for it to be passed onto people with the time and effort to maintain and bring the site back up to its old glory. I feel like if that doesn't happen in another few years there won't be an X-S.