SEEKING NEW OWNER OF FUTANARIPALACE - NEW OWNER FOUND

[EricKeldrev]

Just to put any rumors to rest, this is what happened:

In late 2019, the forum was deluged with spam accounts and hackbots. The reason for this problem was because the individual responsible for the technical maintenance of the forum left. Said individual took over for the person who set up the forum back in the Windows XP era and that individual set up the forum in a manner that was essentially spaghetti code. Due to the age of the forum software and the NEED to get the forum to some degree of manageability, the decision was made to import the forum to newer forum software that could be managed without sifting through endless lines of spaghetti code that was beyond following at that point. The reasoning was that the backup of the forums could be imported into the new software and that only a reasonable amount of coaxing was needed to bring everything up to speed.

The complete import failed.

The reason for that was primarily due to both the size of the forum backup, with ALL of its attachments from a decade and a half, and the spaghetti code creating a backup that could not be read and imported properly by the new forum software. The core structure and the member registry imported, but nothing else did with any modicum of reliability. The attachments, which is what a vast majority of the membership comes here for, was clearly the biggest casualty. 

The backup for the old forum is still archived and is not corrupt. However, it was impossible, given the size of FP's server space, to have both the new forum and the old archive up at the same time. Thus, the old forum received a final archival and it was deleted from the server to resolve errors on the new forum that were a result of running out of disk space.

The first failed import took several weeks to come and go due to the size of the archive and other limitations. The amount of backend work needed to resolve the import failure required a dedicated PROFESSIONAL IT expert to resolve. Finding the right person for this job was the biggest problem that we faced since the upgrade in 2020...
...then fucking COVID hit and shit on everyone.

Once COVID went down, Finding the right person amidst a pandemic imploded. However, between the failure of the import and the inability to find the right person for the job, FP lost a decisive majority of its active membership simply because the import was never finished.

Had I the technical knowledge to have resolved any of these issues, I would have personally done so. However, I did not and I was forced to simply wait, like the rest of the staff, until someone came along to resolve these issues. NaughtyFaun has done a lot to help in the past couple of years, but all of the current staff have our day jobs that keep us busy and the forum needs a ton of work, obviously.

With all of that said, I have hope that the new ownership will resurrect FP and put this period of lingering, slow death behind us.

Thanks for clearing thing up Dxas. It feels like almost everything got hit as all the stories were partially corrupted and are in a borderline unreadable state now as well. Random characters litter the text and such.
Although I still maintain the opinion that early decisive action (namely: killing FP and building it back up from the ground) might have been a lot better than what ended up happening.