Ha, the council of the first ones

@brasco It's hard to tell right now. Fan interaction slows down during the holidays.

@elder True but it never will be like it was. It's one reason Val closed it or so he says.

@longtooth The problem with social media groups is no proper archive for historical research.

@elder There is no archive either when the webmaster shuts the website down.

In one of the followup posts, Val reassured everyone trying to archive the site that the site was being archived officially. Did anything actually come out of that? I kept waiting for elaboration on how it was going to be set up and how to access it before everything got shut down and communication got cut off. But that didn't happen, and it's just been radio silence since. I know most of the individual thread pages have backups on waybackmachine, but that requires you to have the url to the page you want, as waybackmachine can be somewhat finicky to navigate websites through.

Does anyone know if the official archive has already been posted anywhere? Or where news of the release would be posted?

@river Things were unclear. I was confused if closing day meant we had all day on closing day or up to 23:59 the previous day.

Posted by: @longtooth

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@elder There is no archive either when the webmaster shuts the website down.

Excellent retort. Cheers!

So does anyone know if Val is ever going to speak on what happened ? Can any of the old mods share if they can?

@river @brasco

If we can find a social media account one of us can just dm him and try asking. 

Posted by: @he-dad

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@river @brasco

If we can find a social media account one of us can just dm him and try asking. 

@battleramblog can ask

Posted by: @longtooth

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Posted by: @he-dad

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@river @brasco

If we can find a social media account one of us can just dm him and try asking. 

@battleramblog can ask

 

Cool! Can you help us @battleramblog ?

@asterstar Yeah!! When it was still up a few minutes after midnight I was like "Cool! Guess it'll be around for another hour at least (considering time zones are a thing)" and then it went down around 12:30 without any warning.

@river The whole thing was without warning. One week to pack your bags and get out. I saw some people didn't know it was closing until after it closed because they were away on vacation or sick.

Crazy. Sounds like there was a real lack of communication over there.

Posted by: @he-dad

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Posted by: @longtooth

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Posted by: @he-dad

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@river @brasco

If we can find a social media account one of us can just dm him and try asking. 

@battleramblog can ask

 

Cool! Can you help us @battleramblog ?

 

I said he can ask but I doubt he'll bother.

@longtooth putting out a statement would just be a classy thing to do without being asked IMO

@brasco Yes it would and this community is classy so they deserve it. Our community leaders could learn a thing or two from them.

Okay, here's a summary of what Val just said to me in my own words:

There was still lots of interest and traffic on He-Man.org. However, ad revenue there was essentially non-existent. Back in the day it was self-sustaining, but with ad blockers and online browsing, any ad revenue can't even touch the annual hosting costs. Val tried to find a cheaper hosting option (he was looking for that months and weeks before the decision to take it down was made). He couldn't find one that was affordable, given the very large size of the site.  

So basically he was looking for ways to keep it going. But the hosting period for his old server was ending, and since he couldn't find a viable solution, that marked an end date for the site to be online. It seemed abrupt from the point of view of fans, but behind the scenes there was a lot of work to try to find a way to keep it up. It just didn't work out. 

@battleramblog Cool! Thank you for asking bro and thank Val for responding! Did you happen to ask him about the archive? That's how this all came about with @river asking about the archive. Just scroll up to see his op.