I don’t know how it really works but maybe it was where Val was about to have to pay up to keep it going and he just made the decision to go ahead and end it before he had to. 

That may have been the renewal date on the server. Val was trying to find a cheaper solution just prior to the announcement, but couldn't find a good deal given the size of the forums. 

Posted by: @he-man

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I don’t know how it really works but maybe it was where Val was about to have to pay up to keep it going and he just made the decision to go ahead and end it before he had to. 

I wonder if his payment terms were annual. I understand you save money doing it that way but you don't feel those cost savings until your 11th month.

Posted by: @battleramblog

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That may have been the renewal date on the server. Val was trying to find a cheaper solution just prior to the announcement, but couldn't find a good deal given the size of the forums. 

I see. That makes sense then. He was trying to find a solution until time ran out.

Very sad.  I think many fans, including me, tried to step up to offer assistance in various ways.  I think after twenty years of being over-worked and under-capitalized, it was just time.  I wish Val the very best in all of his endeavors.  All MOTU fans owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for keeping the franchise's flames going during the dark times.  

Running that PowerCon is gotta be stressful too unless it's his full time job. I doubt you can get sustain your life doing that though and only that.

Add to that the contract and hosting spec might not have been reviewed recently. The host was presumably running older versions of stuff (the vBulletin install wouldn't have run on newer) which might have held up migrating to a more cost-effective package. vB4 had been out of support for years.

Without knowing contract details, some of it may have been to try to avoid extra final bills. Googling the announcement thread URL before it closed the news was picked up by some communities who'd have been keen to download everything and not lose 20+ years of internet history even if they weren't particularly interested in MOTU.

e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam/comments/17rps3j/hemanorg_forums_shutting_down_after_over_20_years/

Plus members trying to run their own archiving, the amount of data including attachments and people having fast connections these days, it could easily add a ton of bandwidth use in a few days.

edit: e.g. https://forum.hemanworld.com/forum/community/general-discussion-forum/63946-he-man-org-archives

So if He-man.org returned in the future, all of our accounts would still be intact, and all of our posts would still be there?

No one else can start a site called He-man.org. Val Staples will always own it. How much do you think it was costing him annually?

He-Man.Org was the largest and best Masters or the Universe site and it felt like it was MATTEL’S official He-Man site, especially since a lot of the people from the site like Val Stalpes, James Eatock, and Emiliano Santalucia were interviewed for the special features on all the He-man and She-Ra DVDs, and He-Man.org was mentioned in the credits. It made things feel like HE-MAN.ORG would always be around, until we grew old and died.

Admittedly, I never got around to signing up for he-man.org (although, I did anonymously lurk from time to time), so I really have no idea what was happening. Sounds like things had been getting problematic (in the background) for a while now.

Posted by: @dynastymastersuniverse

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So if He-man.org returned in the future, all of our accounts would still be intact, and all of our posts would still be there?

No one else can start a site called He-man.org. Val Staples will always own it. How much do you think it was costing him annually?

He-Man.Org was the largest and best Masters or the Universe site and it felt like it was MATTEL’S official He-Man site, especially since a lot of the people from the site like Val Stalpes, James Eatock, and Emiliano Santalucia were interviewed for the special features on all the He-man and She-Ra DVDs, and He-Man.org was mentioned in the credits. It made things feel like HE-MAN.ORG would always be around, until we grew old and died.

Yes, if it ever went back online, everything in theory would be the same, including the accounts. 

If Val was struggling to find a solution until the day he declared it was closing...I really, really wish he'd asked the community for assistance and spoken a bit about what was happening.

Maybe he wouldn't have been comfortable coming forward, or having other cooks in the kitchen so to speak...but it would have made things a bit clearer.

Saying goodbye is very difficult when you don't understand what's going on.

Even now, we're wondering "is it gone forever?" or "will the backed-up archives become available?" and there are no answers. We don't get what was happening from Val's side and we can only speculate until enough people around him explain it, or he gives an interview or something.

@he-dad I think you’re a right. I believe Val had a lot going on in his life. That said the short notice came as a real big surprise to everyone. I joined in early 2004 and was shocked how the Org closed so quickly. 

@viceroy Power-Con must be like a part time job 9 months a year ya? Maybe a fulltime job for 4 of them. As we get older it's also hard to keep up the pace when we were younger. Best to focus on one thing and work the hell out of it.

One week notice is still kind of crummy but if what @battleramblog is saying is true then the dude didn't let it die without a fight to the bitter end.

Posted by: @he-dad

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@viceroy Power-Con must be like a part time job 9 months a year ya? Maybe a fulltime job for 4 of them. As we get older it's also hard to keep up the pace when we were younger. Best to focus on one thing and work the hell out of it.

One week notice is still kind of crummy but if what @battleramblog is saying is true then the dude didn't let it die without a fight to the bitter end.

Yeah, there was definitely a plan to keep the forums going, I know this first-hand. Unfortunately it just wasn't financially feasible. 

Why do you think he didn't speak to any of this?

Some people flat out don't like talking about money or asking for help (or dealing with people who mean well but don't have experience, particularly on technical stuff). It sounds like running out of time to investigate was a factor. Possibly genuinely thought he'd exhausted options. Possibly also that people could put forward workable solutions, but it would've involving handing stuff over to people who could action them. Or all of the above plus other factors. He's got family, kids to save for, none of us getting younger, etc.

If the site had gotten to the point where it was costing hundreds of dollars a month which he was paying out of pocket, that's a situation that's already been allowed to run for too long (you can get dedicated servers from reputable providers for less). That's the point at which disaggregating stuff should've already happened so that expensive legacy hosting arrangements weren't dragging things down. That's the point you decide to find a way of keeping old stuff available at low/no cost but that the site and forum will go forward, if at all, with a mostly fresh start approach to dodge issues with old tech and not need loads of (ongoing) time which nobody has.

And it can seem daunting even if you do some of that technical stuff for a living.

Also, something does appear to be happening behind the scenes -- it looks like the hosting for the domain changed from Cogeco to another company yesterday, or at least since it was last scanned. Might just be temporary arrangements to keep email, etc, functioning but the site is still responding even if the vB database isn't available.

@denyer you know why the info part shut down years ago and why the forum side shut down for a month?

I'm going to guess it's down to server software dependencies, with a specific guess of PHP. vBulletin 4.2.5 doesn't run on PHP 7.2 or later. The site is probably running 7.0 or 7.1 at the moment. 5.6 went out of support at the end of 2018 although lots of hosts kept it around past that point, despite security risks, because upgrading would have broken their customer sites. (Many sites used CMS stuff that no longer had maintainers or there was no upgrade path for, or had bespoke code). Database server software (MySQL, MariaDB, etc, whatever was used) would be another thing.

Not sure which shut down you're referring to, I hadn't been to the Org in years except occasionally looking at the toy resources, but it might have been to try to upgrade the environment as much as the forum software would allow.

Val would probably have needed old code for the main site rewriting to some extent, which would make sense if there was a call put out for devs and helpers. Most of the 5.6 to 7.0 changes were things like changes to the way you connect to databases, syntax being stricter, etc. The site was more complex than simple includes, but probably not doing anything wildly complicated if was a DIY job. If it was dependent on unmaintained and unmaintainable CMS stuff, the best option would have been (and still probably would be -- plus most of it could probably be salvaged from archive.org, ignoring any copyright issues) to make the text/image assets available and let volunteers stick the useful stuff into a wiki.

@denyer

Posted by: @denyer

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I'm going to guess it's down to server software dependencies, with a specific guess of PHP. vBulletin 4.2.5 doesn't run on PHP 7.2 or later. The site is probably running 7.0 or 7.1 at the moment. 5.6 went out of support at the end of 2018 although lots of hosts kept it around past that point, despite security risks, because upgrading would have broken their customer sites. (Many sites used CMS stuff that no longer had maintainers or there was no upgrade path for, or had bespoke code). Database server software (MySQL, MariaDB, etc, whatever was used) would be another thing.

{she-ra}:confused:

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Also https://flyingmoose.org/heman/mustard.htm