So here's what has been going on
Posted: Tue August 26th, 2008, 9:28 am
Given the amount of questions that there have been about what happened at Historicalfiction.org, I thought I would lay out the events as I know of them, and then we can move forward in our new home!
When historicalfiction.org was started just under three years ago, the owner was an active participant and moderator. Just under a year later, the forum was sold without any warning to anyone to a new owner. Initially, there wasn't really a noticeable change, but as the time went on the response times kept on getting longer and longer, to the point where the monthly updates to the home page some times didn't happen for several months. That was not the only frustrating thing. As none of the moderators had administration rights, we could not even set up any new sections in the forum like we wanted to let alone anything else.
Then, in July or August last year the site was sold again to a UK based company. We didn't actually find out until some time later, and so immediately started trying to contact the new owners to ask them to give us at least access to the forums so that we could have some control. One of our biggest fears was that something would happen to the forum and that we wouldn't know what was going on - fears that turned out to be justified in the end.
In the time since the forum was sold again, we have had one contact with the new owners, despite the fact that we have been emailing them constantly since at least January, and to the point where we have been trying to phone them as well (my phone bill is looking a little bigger than usual given the amount of times I have phoned the UK from Australia). Every time I have phoned them over the last six to eight weeks, the contact that we have was either in meetings, not available or out - it is hard not to reach the conclusion that he doesn't want to talk to us - and there was no one else available to help us. More emails, both directly to the contact and to the general email address have been sent, but still no response.
Then we get to the events of Friday. Yet more emails, and more phone calls and still I could not make contact with the owners. The thing is that even if we did manage to get through to someone, it would still be just a temporary fix for now because given our experiences over the last year basically, I can't help but think that in the long term things were not going to get any better.
My main reason for telling you all of this is to reassure you that the decision to start this forum is not a spur of the moment decision. It is something that has been brewing for a very long time. It is very upsetting to lose so much information but hopefully with everyone's assistance we will be able to build up a bigger and better resource! We are off to a great start.
I am not sure how much we will be able to recover, even through cached Google searches etc, but if people have specific threads that they would like to try to recover then certainly feel free.
Now that the mods own this site, we now have the flexibility to make the changes that we want to make, without having to wait for someone else to do it for us. We have some ideas that we are working on, but for the time being we are just trying to concentrate on getting this place up and running and then we will try to make it a bit prettier etc!
We are so grateful to everyone who contacted us wanting to know what was going on, and offering support. We hope that you enjoy our new home and we look forward to continuing to discuss great books with you all, and sharing with you all!
When historicalfiction.org was started just under three years ago, the owner was an active participant and moderator. Just under a year later, the forum was sold without any warning to anyone to a new owner. Initially, there wasn't really a noticeable change, but as the time went on the response times kept on getting longer and longer, to the point where the monthly updates to the home page some times didn't happen for several months. That was not the only frustrating thing. As none of the moderators had administration rights, we could not even set up any new sections in the forum like we wanted to let alone anything else.
Then, in July or August last year the site was sold again to a UK based company. We didn't actually find out until some time later, and so immediately started trying to contact the new owners to ask them to give us at least access to the forums so that we could have some control. One of our biggest fears was that something would happen to the forum and that we wouldn't know what was going on - fears that turned out to be justified in the end.
In the time since the forum was sold again, we have had one contact with the new owners, despite the fact that we have been emailing them constantly since at least January, and to the point where we have been trying to phone them as well (my phone bill is looking a little bigger than usual given the amount of times I have phoned the UK from Australia). Every time I have phoned them over the last six to eight weeks, the contact that we have was either in meetings, not available or out - it is hard not to reach the conclusion that he doesn't want to talk to us - and there was no one else available to help us. More emails, both directly to the contact and to the general email address have been sent, but still no response.
Then we get to the events of Friday. Yet more emails, and more phone calls and still I could not make contact with the owners. The thing is that even if we did manage to get through to someone, it would still be just a temporary fix for now because given our experiences over the last year basically, I can't help but think that in the long term things were not going to get any better.
My main reason for telling you all of this is to reassure you that the decision to start this forum is not a spur of the moment decision. It is something that has been brewing for a very long time. It is very upsetting to lose so much information but hopefully with everyone's assistance we will be able to build up a bigger and better resource! We are off to a great start.
I am not sure how much we will be able to recover, even through cached Google searches etc, but if people have specific threads that they would like to try to recover then certainly feel free.
Now that the mods own this site, we now have the flexibility to make the changes that we want to make, without having to wait for someone else to do it for us. We have some ideas that we are working on, but for the time being we are just trying to concentrate on getting this place up and running and then we will try to make it a bit prettier etc!
We are so grateful to everyone who contacted us wanting to know what was going on, and offering support. We hope that you enjoy our new home and we look forward to continuing to discuss great books with you all, and sharing with you all!