TDA's Future - new domain, new server
As most of you know, TDA is owned by the same person who owned HPFF and owns Pottersworld.
When the old HPFF forums and archives went down, TDA and Pottersworld were moved to a different, smaller server, with Jay, the owner, promising us that he'll keep the sites online. The sites are much smaller than HPFF and much cheaper to host.
HPFF was bought by the people from Fanfictionrecommendations.com and shortly after Jay contacted us and the PW admins, offering we take over our sites. We agreed at the time that that would be a good idea since it would allow us to take the site in any direction we want and we wouldn't be dependent on Jay who had no interest in being involved with TDA and PW, Katlynn/saturn. kindly offered to host TDA for free because her workplace gives her free hosting, Becca/ForgottenFace also offered. After that, Jay hasn't contacted us and we were unable to contact him for months now.
A couple days ago, PW went down. They are running on very old software (from 2007!) and ours isn't much better (the forum software we are currently running hasn't been supported since April 2017 and it's been discontinued. Our life-long license has also expired (because it turns out that life-long doesn't actually mean life-long). We, well, mostly Becca/ForgottenFace and Katlynn/saturn., are trying to help the PW admins in getting their site back up and running.
In the midst of all that, we have decided to buy new domains for TDA and PW - the-dark-arts.org and pottersworld.org because we really can't go on like this, keeping the sites afloat whereas if there's an issue with the server or something, we can't do anything about it and Jay is unreachable (at least he's been unreachable).
The new domain for TDA costs 12$ per year and it's a cost that we will divide between ourselves as admins (from what I'm aware, the same goes for PW). It will be hosted by Becca/ForgottenFace.
We will transfer TDA to the new domain and new host, with upgraded software. A backup will be made of our database so that no posts or members are lost. Your accounts will be the same as they are now and we shouldn't lose anything but, just in case, please do backup your galleries and anything else you want.
For now, the plan is to put the forums offline on Friday, November 9th, 10 AM GMT. If that date changes, we'll let you know. Becca will make the switch during the day and we should be back online on the new domain and server on Friday night.
The old TDA will stay offline and there will be a message linking to the new TDA.
For the first couple of days, the new TDA won't have everything we have right now (for example the shoutbox, all the different skins etc) but we will work on getting those back soon. In the meantime, you can chat in the spam topic in the Break Room.
We will have skin and header competitions open to our members for the new TDA and everyone is welcome to contribute.
Some of you may remember our old merchandise store. We're currently in the process of setting up a new store to help pay for site maintenance costs, keep an eye out for further announcements about that in the next couple of weeks. The money from the merchandise store will only ever go into paying for the domain and forum software. The designs will come from the TDA community, in the same way it did the last time - we will set up a thread to post your designs.
This announcement will also be sent out via email to all our members so that everyone has a chance to see it.
If you have any questions please post them HERE+!
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