Fear not, it's not forgotten, and only temporarily gone. It will be back, new and better.
I'll use this thread as a place to keep you all updated.
Here's the story and status :
Early this year the site was getting slammed by hacks that inserted bad code into the site, causing people's computers to get infections when they visited. Whoever or whatever was doing it seemed determined, because they would use different 'entry points' into the FY code whenever we fixed the prior one. So Peter Whipple and I would have to go in and clean it up regularly, and eventually had to 'seal off' parts of the site, removing functions that were vulnerable to attack code. That worked for awhile. I continued to do regular updates and add visual/text content by FTP, and people could still at least enter reviews of concerts.
Then around May, the site's ISP,
riva.net -- who actually own the FY domain name, due to an unfortunate (but at the time attractive) deal Peter made with them for free hosting -- shut down administrative access to the site; our logins no longer worked. No explanation given, no replies sent to the many email and phone inquiries made by Peter and myself.
I was still able, through a script Peter fortunately had written previously, to do a limited range of text edits , which is how I was able to add the last tour dates. But that's all. Without FTP access, administering the site became basically impossible.
Meanwhile, Peter had long been working on a new version of the site, with much more secure code, and new features, and that was ready to launch by midsummer. But we didn't want to do it knowing that the old site was still there.
We figured that come late August, when the domain expired, Peter would be able to take the domain back, and we could move forward. He was ready to do so but found, on the actual day, that the domain had been automatically re-assigned to riva.net.
Late October I was in the DC area and thought I would pay a visit to riva.net, which according to WHOIS records is based in Riva, MD. But I couldn't find an actual address beyond a PO Box. Every ISP path I traced , and every phone number 'officially' associated with riva and its related entities (e.g., ARCHAEUS.NET, ARCHAEIC.COM, SKYCOMM, INTERCACHE), was a dead end. (One phone number for turned out to be for a phone sex line). So I wasn't able to deal with riva.net directly.
When I got back, I decided to review all my FY-related correspondence. I found an old email from Elys Rand, who had been one of several people who helped Peter set up the site originally (before I signed on), and who helped me out once when there was a problem with the site. I traced Elys' ISP info from his email headers it turned out to be...riva.net. I found out from Peter that Elys had in fact been his original contact to riva. So I wrote Elys asking if he knew what was going on, and could he help us out. No reply. But within a day or two, FY went down completely, and it's still down today.
That's where we stand today. It appears to be a *good* sign that the site is gone; it would be better still if we had ownership of the forgottenyesterdays.com. Peter has written the appropriate authorities to request the domain back. In the meantime , be assured that the database was fortunately backed up before the site went down, so we can re-launch without having to re-create the data manually (which would have been impossible in the case of reviews). And that's good too.
I have suggested that if riva.net doesn't let go of the domain name, that we try a new name -- perhaps TheRemembering_dot_whatever (com,org,net, whatever is available)? What do you guys think? (Personally I always thought 'Forgotten Yesterdays' was a bit odd, since the whole point of the site is that we *aren't* letting those yesterdays be forgotten.)
When there are new developments, I'll be posting them to this thread.
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Originally Posted by ssully
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