•The moderators of the official South Park Discord server announced they are shutting it down immediately, citing a breakdown in communication with the show’s parent companies over the past two years.
In a screenshot of the announcement shared by the volunteer committee, the team explained that regular contact with employees at South Park Digital Studios and Paramount had dwindled from weekly communications to gaps of up to six months or longer.
“Paramount and South Park Digital Studios have effectively put us in charge of their official property and left us to manage it without consistent support,” the announcement read, according to a report by Kotaku.
The immediate trigger came after an update to Discord’s bot policies took one of the server’s moderation bots offline. Restoring the bot required personal information that the volunteer team felt was inappropriate to provide given their history with doxxing incidents. The team reached out to Paramount for assistance but said it received no response.
“We felt […] Paramount, as the owner, should’ve completed this process. We received no response,” the moderators wrote.
The recent merger between Paramount and Skydance, completed last week, has further complicated efforts to resolve the issue.
“We have exhausted all available avenues to attempt contact and the formation of Skydance (The Paramount-WBD merger) has made finding contacts now an impossible task,” the moderators said.
Kotaku has reached out to Paramount for comment on the server’s closure.
The shutdown is one of several negative consequences attributed to the merger. Another event, though described as subjective in its negativity, was a recent massive leak of Cartoon Network data containing over 200 gigabytes of information including show bibles, background and character art files, storyboards, and production guides.
a recent massive leak of Cartoon Network data
KFC Spain created a video featuring assets from the leak before it was swiftly removed, possibly as a result of Skydance issuing numerous DMCA notices. Some X accounts have preserved the video.
Earlier this year, the Avatar Aang movie also leaked, though a subsequent investigation that led to the arrest of a potential suspect found that incident was not Paramount’s fault.
The moderators said they locked the server in hopes that Paramount will reach out so it can be restored. “It is important to remember that we are volunteers who have chosen to do this for the community for free. We are not South Park Digital Studios, Skydance, or Comedy Central staff. We are simply South Park fans.”
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