So Portal II is too big of a game, so I am switching to a smaller and simpler puzzle game.

well the omnimaga contest is a platformer one, and i think the UnSS is a puzzle one, so i think that certain programmers like just one of those, so they'll pick the one they like

aah ok I was worried

ok, as of yesterday there is one week left in the contest, so get your programs finished people, and now is not the time to redo them all (not that I feel like anybody would)

Well if you meant UnSS it was more because only like 3 days after Omnimaga contest started, other contests started pouring in the community, the main other one being UnSS so I thought it would drain Omnimaga contest from most of its contestants (since people could turn their platformer into a puzzle game or an hybrid of platformer/puzzle

As for stolen contest idea I meant more TI-Freakware in 2006, as their contest started like the day after ours was about to start and was pretty much an exact copy of ours except we had no prizes, so it killed our contest. Back then some TI-FW admins were Omnimaga staff and had direct access to our ideas in the staff forum but I think at that time TI-Freakware was not very active so they were trying to get more members. I am unsure if there were bad intentions behind this but I didn't took it very lightly so I didn't organized a contest on Omnimaga until Noahbaby decided to do one recently

Fortunately the fact ticalc posted a news about ours might help a bit in some ways to get more contestants. UnSS might get more last minute entries as well, as UnSS contest is advertised on Omnimaga, which is linked from ticalc.org directly on their front page. My only worry is that people might not have enough time to finish their entries .

Lol, well I used to be a lot more active, though

On the old Omnimaga forums (that went down at the end of 2007) I had over 11000 posts to myself. Sometimes I had like 20-30 a day, altough this was nothing compared to Kalan_Vod and Spellshaper/Spelli, who had sometimes 70 a day

Well actually Omnimaga reached 55100-55400 posts from what I remember. Here's the most recent archive.org cache that isn't screwed up by the anti-spambot mod we had at the time:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071021214343/omnimaga.org/index.php?act=idx
This is how Omnimaga looked like approximately until its demise on Jan 1st 2008

as for the reason why it shutted down it is explained both here and here, altough it doesn't really go into every details, such as how before the shut down haters managed to get almost the entire staff on their side, which lead to the site demise.

Afterward a few remaining members kept asking me to not permanently keep Omnimaga closed, so I started a temporarly board and submitted a board restoral request on Invisionfree. However I and most people took the board restoration for granted and since most people didn't want to post on the temp board since the old one would eventually return, they all gave up and we went down to like 1 post a day, sometimes 3 days without any post. Most staff and members stayed active on other boards instead, so it became clear that Omnimaga would not survive so I gave up on the site on March 3rd.

During the time we were on a small temporary board, some people from #tcpa launched spam attacks and 711chan/anon raids on the site and IRC channel. This caused most old staff to finally know what the troublemakers were up to and they returned on my side, but it was not enough to bring back activity on the temp site forever. This is not to mention most people didn't like the software used on the temporary board (Zetaboards) too much, altough it wasn't that bad IMHO, especially the PM system.

We stayed closed for half a year afterward and I had no intention to bring a new site back up. The IRC channel remained open, though, as well as the staff music files. In retaliation to what people did to us (mostly from #tcpa) I also requested my entire ticalc.org profile to be taken down on January 1st 2008. However it took ticalc.org 4 and half a months to awnser my request and they forgot to delete Metroid II Evolution and Illusiat series.

However in August 2008 people started to bug me non stop so I start a fresh new Omnimaga board. At first I was a bit relunctant about the idea, thinking people would give up posting after a month once again, but I finally decided to start a board anyway, but made it clear we were starting from scratch, so people won't think it's a temporary board. We opened in August 25th 2008 and officially told everyone on IRC on September 1st 2008, the day of Omnimaga 7th anniversary. However, we never actually announced the site re-opening to public on any other site afterward

Fortunately now things seems to go pretty well, we rarely ever get trolls and haters and we're active again. Plus, if the site ever closed for any reason again Netham does nightly backups so we can restore the database right away, something that was impossible with the old board, since we used a free forum hosting.

Omnimaga is still hated by some people because we're meant to be a forum free of any hostility. Unlike every other TI sites any provocative remarks or destructive comments on someone or his project can get you suspended in two or three shots. UTI has rules regarding respecting each others, but since about July or August, the moderators has been increasingly more lax so most bad behaviour is left unpunished. There are people who hate us because they see this as dictatorship, while in fact we're just trying to provide at least one environment where users can announce their new game in the works, regardless of if it's BASIC, ASM, 1 or 50 sub-programs, 1 or 500 KB, libs or not. There are several members from other TI forums, including some on United-TI and TI-BASIC Developper, that would probably not last long over here.