The web is transient... (Death of Unicreatures)

Just had a really nasty reminder of just how transient. A site I spent far too many hours on with one of the nicest user communities I have ever met was taken down. It wasn't running out of money, none of the staff or users were warned, and I found out because I was paged on twitter (thank you very much to the user who told me!) It was just pulled.

Details here

This was right after the big winter event that many users had paid for. Understandably they are angry. I am currently shocked. Once I have had a chance to think, I may be angry.

But all that writing, the artwork, seven years of community or more, the friendships and all the rest - just gone. Because one person pulled the plug.

Screw it.

 

I read the link, and that's awful. You don't just pull a site like that! You just don't.

 

tirial, tell me you're joking. It can't be gone. All my creatures? Isn't there anything we can do?

 

I'm sorry. I lost a large collection. If you are lucky you might be able to find pages on archive.org, but in practice it seems the site is dead. There's a FB page giving updates which might also help if you had money in the account.

 

Sorry, I'm logging off for tonight. Sorry.

 

Thanks. I might point a few friends here, since they aren't on FaceBook. What an end to a weekend.

 

Damn, that's nasty. There's gotta be a lot of people with time invested in it who are not going to be happy.

Are there no backups or has the owner made sure there are none?

 

Sorry. I'm quitting for tonight as well.

 

So any update? How is the community doing and are they getting it back together?

 

There's a new site being built, but it looks like all the collections etc from the original site are gone. A lot of users are very upset.

 

It reminds me of a piece I was reading about fire storms. One of the differences between a natural disaster and a man-made one is how people react. Both make them angry, both hurt people, but only in the man-made one do people have someone to blame and people don't forget quickly.

Likewise most site closures are due to circumstances. This one was a decision, taken unilaterally and with only one person responsible. If you look at the forums, the blame is being placed quite firmly, and it is likely to hit his future projects.

And all for something unnecessary.

 

Pissing off a community of several thousand does seem like something that could damage future prospects, if only because how many people are willing to work with someone who might delete all their work without warning?

 

How frustrating that must be! It just isn't right for one person to just up and decide that they are going to pull a site that so many others are using without a good reason or even communicating with the community.. Everything is figureoutable, and whatever problem caused them to make that decision might have been solved if people had been allowed to put their heads together.

 

Along these lines, went looking for a few sites I knew years and years ago. Suddenly popped into mind and I thought I'd go see if they were still there.

Nothing. Not a sausage. Just 404's, sedo parking and vague copies of it in the web archive. The sites had been down for a few years for some reasons or another, but it was like wandering back to where I grew up and realising it had all changed.

 

Oh my gosh @Kindler, we think the same. I went looking for a few sites too, and that's why I came back to this thread again. I found a bunch of 404 pages telling me that the content I was looking for was gone. I hate when that happens.