@Megalomaniak said:
Yes, the previous domain expired and it was registered by a previous administrator who has since retired. @TwistedTwigleg hopes to be able to get it back but that's going to take a while since the domain is in grace period where it can't be acquired by anyone else.
That is indeed the plan. Unfortunately, it may take quite awhile before the domain leaves the grace period, and in the meantime the forums will have to be hosted on another domain entirely.
Ultimately we inquired and it should actually be possible for us to get a godotengine.org sub-domain for the forum however the the people with access to set that up are busy what with 3.1 release and the GDC.
We also plan to change host in near-ish future(exact date TBD however we will announce downtime ahead of time) and update the forum software as well as potentially the theme - possibly to be more in line with the engine website.
@TwistedTwigleg has set up a test forum already on his server however I'm going to leave it up to him to post the link here once he feels it's ready for user testing.
The test forum is almost ready for user testing, I just want to do a few more things and then it should be ready to go. Most everything is there and working, mainly there are just some minor things that still need tweaking and adjusting.
Hopefully the wait should not be too long. I do not have a time frame just yet, but my goal is to try to get it ready for everyone to test sometime this week :smile:
@kryzmak said:
Yes, seems very weird to me too. Domain browse-tutorials.com is hosted in Germany. Is this some sort of website-hijacking? ;-)
Do not worry, the domain hasn't been hijacked, taken over, or changed without anyone knowing. You can trust the domain and the host, as the person hosting it has been very generous in hosting the forums before the domain even expired and continues to help us! We wouldn't even be to this stage if he didn't lend us a hand :smile:
As far as the sudden change, for that I apologize.
The reason we didn't announce the change prior to moving the forums was because we didn't realize that the old forums domain, godotengine.org, was going to go into a grace period. Had we known about the grace period, we would have handled the situation differently.
We only knew about the domain expiring a short time before it actually expired and so we had a limited time to try and control the situation. Unfortunately because of the short time window we had, there wasn't really enough time to make an announcement prior to the domain expiring.
Thankfully we have a rough plan to guide the forums moving forward and in the short term the forums are hosted here while we figure everything out (thanks to the generosity of @ram4nd).
The forums are not going away or anything, we just are shifting and changing things so that the forums can continue to grow strong in the future!
I plan to write up a detailed explanation of what happened, what the plan is moving forward, and where you can find the test forums soon.
Many thanks to everyone involved and for everyone's patience while we figure this all out! It hopefully shouldn't be too much longer before things are stable and consistent again.
