Wawa-Mania

» see wawa-mania.ec as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Wawa-Mania was a French forum where members posted download links. The files sat on hosts like Megaupload and RapidShare, and the board held the index, with a section per kind of release and moderators who cleared out dead links. The banner read "Wawa Mania, partage et telechargement". It ran on FluxBB, a small open source forum package whose name is still in the footer of the 2011 captures.

Dimitri Mader opened it on 11 November 2006 under the name Zac. TorrentFreak gave his age as 26 at his sentencing in 2015, which makes him seventeen or eighteen on launch day. French Wikipedia notes the timing: Oleoo, the biggest French board of the moment, was tied up in legal trouble of its own that autumn. A year later, on 5 November 2007, Wawa-Mania counted 300,000 members.

By 2011 it was described as the largest French warez site, claiming more than 2 million members and 600,000 unique visitors a month. Every film carried a VF or VOSTFR tag, French dub or French subtitles, and that accounts for most of the size. The bigger English-language boards did not sort by either.

~ the record ~

~ zac, then htcpower ~

In June 2009 the BEFTI, the Paris police unit for computer fraud, took Mader into custody on a complaint from the music society SACEM. TorrentFreak adds that the film industry's anti-piracy group ALPA had counted more than 3,600 films reachable through the board. In 2010 he was charged with counterfeiting of works and changed his handle to HTCpower. The forum stayed open through all of it.

The address kept moving. The board left its Samoan .ws domain in April 2012 for a .cc address, and by November it answered at wawa-mania.ec in Ecuador. TorrentFreak reported in 2015 that the hosting was in Moldova, with a provider The Pirate Bay had used before. Mader himself had left France for the Philippines in 2011.

~ two euros a download ~

The criminal verdict came in April 2015: one year in prison, handed down in his absence, plus a fine that French Wikipedia gives as 15,000 euros and TorrentFreak as 20,000. The civil side followed on 2 July 2015, when the court ordered him to pay more than 13 million euros to a list of Hollywood studios with Microsoft at the end of it. The Paris Court of Appeal upheld the amount on 7 June 2017. It accepted that a visit was no proof of a download, then priced every work it believed had been downloaded at two euros.

Mader told TorrentFreak that he smiled when he first heard the figure. "The penalty wasn't designed to be a refund but only to scare," he said, adding that the rights holders knew collecting even a tenth of it was impossible. He also made an offer: "If I can come back with my family, I will keep my word and definitely close the forum."

~ back in a few hours ~

In September 2015 the site was rebuilt on its own software, NinjaCMS, paid for by donations, and the migration knocked the forum offline for more than a day. NextWarez reported that in April 2016 Zac presented the lighter CMS as a way to cut hosting costs, after which he meant to step back and let the community run itself. The archive's capture of 11 October 2016 shows a plain text notice where the forum used to be: "Le reverse proxy vps de wm est actuellement down". It promised that no data was lost and that "le forum sera de retour d'ici quelques heures". NextWarez wrote to Zac and got no answer. On 21 January 2017 the domain began forwarding to the NinjaCMS page on GitHub, and in August 2017 it showed a Stephen King line, "Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back", under the words "coming soon". wawa-mania.ec is a for-sale lander today.

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