Due to changes in life, mainly moving house, I unfortunately have to stop hosting the forums.
We have only just got settled with the gameservers.nl hosting company, we have an excellent server, with lots of bandwidth, space and all that crap. At £45 quid a month it is a lot better than the £70+ quid a month I have was used to paying - however since moving into my new house the forums are the second largest single outgoing from my income - after my rent! I've got plenty of other things to be spending money on these days - so it's for this simple reason, that I am moving on.
The forums will not die or be closed completely, they will be dramatically scaled down over the next few days - or weeks - depending on how long it takes gameservers.nl too pull the plug and disconnect it from the 'net.
The following cutbacks will be made
- Community Hosted Forums will be closed down. Sorry guys, these forums represent a majority of the content on the forums. I will have a copy of the database which I might be able to export your threads and posts from to any other forums you may move too after this.
- General forums trimmed a bit, some forums merged/consolidated
- Chit-chat forum will become 100% spam free. This means LOL thread too, and all the other threads which are not about a particular topic.
- Forums moved over to the www.utassault.net web server - which is a lot slower, however with the cutbacks above the forum community should be able to survive to talk about UT:AS related topics.
- Possibly more - as soon as a proper migration plan is in place we'll update you.
I'm sure Phear, CS and the other admins can consider any offer from any other individual who wants to take on hosting the forums. Obviously this will be at our/their discretion, so that not just anyone who can afford to pay ~200 euros a quarter for hosting of the forums can buy it out and then destroy it. I'd rather see things scaled down and the community survive, rather than the forums and the database being sold to a marketing company so we all get mail-spammed to death. It's not going to happen.
I've sat back from time and grinned at how well this community has done, and how well utassault.net has progressed over the past 3 years(ish) that I have been around it. I've laughed my fucking ass off at times, at threads on the forums, conversations on IRC, banter and moves in games, LAN parties and pissups, good friends and top internet scum enemies. It's been an experience, and I personally feel that I have been able to enjoy this community a great deal - and for that I gotta thank you all. It's the people that make it, not the rules/regulations or whos a mod. I feel content with the way things have ended up - if I could, I'd keep on going. But now is probably the right time to do it.
Sorry to anyone who I have let down by doing this - hopefully you'll understand, if not now then 1 day.
I'll post more updates when I have them.