IMPORTANT - staff change and move to a Fanrestore.com domain

[Feallan]

Hi everyone,
you may or may not know who I am. I'm Feallan, and I've been an admin of this forum for about 6.5 years now. When I took up this job, the forum was in a terrible state, with multiple spam bots every day and serious performance and downtime issues, but these problems were so long ago, you may not even remember them. I barely post these days, because I don't have as much free time as I used to, but I lurk many threads and I'm here at least for a couple of minutes pretty much every day. My main activities concerning Fanres have always been just keeping the forum up and running on my hosting service, updating the software, fixing issues that may arise, introducing plugins from time to time, things like that.

As for why I'm introducing myself all of a sudden, well it's just to give a bit of a context to a difficult decision I've had to make. There are two administrators of Fanres, myself who pays for hosting and spoRv who pays for (and therefore owns) the fanres.com domain. Recently we've come to such a conflict, that I do not see a way to cooperate with him in the future. Previously, any changes to the forum, even small ones were always consulted between the two of us and forum moderators, PDB and Doombot, and we always have had to come to some sort of unanimous agreement. Recently, spoRv has done a ton of changes to the forum layout and underlying settings on his own, knowing that the rest of us clearly and strongly objected to them. Not only that, but because of his rash and unplanned approach, the forum suffered a very long, near 24 hours downtime, something I would never allow to happen. After the resulting argument he expressed dissatisfaction with our "agreement" approach and offered me a choice which came down to basically resigning peacefully, or getting booted. Granted, he later cooled off and apologized for it, but the core issue remained unresolved: the conflict is still there, spoRv still wants to have complete control of the forum, and it has only faded out because of my silence on this matter. spoRv believes Fanres is somehow 100% his own creation which he, and he alone should be free to change to his liking, without thinking about the opinion of other users. Myself, I don't like this kind of attitude, to me Fanres is a community that can't exist without its users, and I'm just sort of a janitor who provides the platform for the posts that you guys make. These two approaches cannot coexist and I don't trust spoRv to do right by the forum, or its users.

After discussion with PDB and Doombot, who are both not only moderators, but also prominent users here, we decided to basically pack up and move the forum to a new domain, called Fanrestore.com, one that we own and that has nothing to do with spoRv who we believe is not fit to run a forum. Fanres.com domain has been set to redirect to Fanrestore.com, the site you are now on, but that can change any minute if spoRv decides to restart the Fanres forum on his own. If he does that, know that he is the only staff member who will remain there, the rest of us will be at Fanrestore.com. If you believe we will do a better job than spoRv, please update your bookmark, there is nothing else you have to do (you may just have to re-login), as Fanrestore.com is the exact same forum instance. It has the same database and software, your username, password, post history etc. carries over. I'm very sad it has come to this, I really hate all kinds of forum drama, this one is especially nasty since it may cause a userbase split, but unfortunately at this point it's either us or spoRv and we feel we can't back down and let him ruin the site we've been on for years. I hope all of you guys follow us to the new domain.

Feallan

[PDB]

Hi everyone,

I hope you read this with the earnestness and importance that we want you to.

I just want to backup everything Feallan said in the above post. I didn’t want this to happen but I feel that we were boxed in and now have no choice. As a mod on this site for pretty much it’s entire existence I know that Feallan’s work behind the scenes not only kept the site running and growing but also kept us from going over the edge. So I have decided to run with him.

Moving forward I will only be posting projects on our new site: fanrestore.com. To most that might mean nothing but for a few of you that like my projects, I just want you to know where I am. It is my hope that many of the members whose advice I follow and projects I admire will come with us to the new domain.

Please update your bookmarks. Thanks to everyone and I’ll see you over there!

[Hitcher]

I don't have anything important to say other than I'm sorry to hear it's come to this.

[spoRv]

Wish you all the best with your new project!

Still, would be nice to have the forum backup, as I asked the Fanres superadmin three weeks ago, and still waiting for his answer.
This is for respect for the users that eventualy may decide to continue to stay on Fanres.

[Beber]

I was afraid this whole thing was a hack from pirates impersonating admins and moderators wanting to collect our information, but I guess spoRv's message above clears it: so this is for real? Whoah!

[MrBrown]

Uhm..
I vote for a peaceful coexistence between the two forums!
I don't wanna be that kid with two divorced parents, that starts a fight over their kids heads. (to speak figurative)
And I do not need two group of kids fight over the topic whose parent is the better one.

[Behodar]

I was afraid this whole thing was a hack from pirates impersonating admins and moderators wanting to collect our information, but I guess spoRv's message above clears it: so this is for real? Whoah!

Wow, I didn't even consider that and I just went ahead and clicked the link and typed my password in without even thinking about it! Maybe I'm easier to cyber-attack than I thought

Anyway, in this case it's legitimate. It's never a good thing when the leadership of a project wants to take things in different directions and I hope that over time things will settle down and all will be well.

[DoomBot]

Yes, it's sad it had come to this but here we are.
I feel the move was necessary to continue on with our little community.
Some of these recent changes were just too much. We would always talk it out and agree or disagree on anything major done to the site but it looks like that wasn't going to happen that way ever again.
Feallan has done a great job of keeping up the site for so long, I for one would rather he continue on to keep this site running properly.

I hope everyone decides to stay here and call FanRestore home!

[FrankT]

I had no idea this was going on..

[Valeyard]

You need a Favicon for the new forum, how about this one that I made?



I just want to back up what @Feallan and the mods have said here as well. I was unaware of this dispute, but it did seem inevitable.

I hope that @spoRv will continue to participate here, but as a valued member and forum founder rather than as an admin.