The simple answer? The dedicated server hosting expired. That’s about it.
Right, the next question is how did that happen?
Now is the semi-long part.
I lost interest in Woopig years ago. But there was still traffic and it had value to people in some ways. But more than anything else, if the bills were paid, I was happy to renew the server. And every year, donors stepped up and paid the bill.
Godaddy started notifying me a couple of years ago that the server would reach end-of-life in 2023. At the end of the current hosting package. I wasn’t up for provisioning a new server, referring back to my lack of interest above. So I told a couple of people that I was out and we needed to find someone to transition this to. The “couple of people” said they would handle it. And let me say, I’m not trying to be cryptic in not naming them. I’ve done so in the Woopig Discord channel I was in. Any anger and blame should be pointed at them, so I don’t want to name them here, on this post.
At that point, it seemed like it was going to be easy…just transfer ownership of the hosting over to a different GoDaddy account. But, that’s not how they do things. A new server would have to be stood up and the site migrated to it. All of the site. Database, server settings, board code, all the stuffs.
I learned this about a month before the server renewal in 2022. It didn’t feel right just dropping this hot potato in the laps of the “couple of people” and I said I’d handle the server renewal for 2022-2023 and did a donation thread and got it paid for. But I was still out on the whole thing. Again, because I lost interest.
So at the bare minimum, the “couple of people” had a year’s notice this was coming. Actually about 18 months. I provided the login to the backend that gave the keys to the kingdom to one of them. Everything needed to migrate the site, except for control of the domain woopig.net, was there.
Whether or not I stayed involved, March 2023 was the end of the server we were on. It was set to be retired when we released it. No matter what, a new server was going to have to be provisioned. Again referring to my lack of interest, I had zero desire to do any of that and it fell to the “couple of people” to take care of.
I got a text in November 2022…
.”Hey, what’s our deadline to move the server?”
“The year ends on March 3”
“Thanks”
I often wondered what was going on, but since I chose to not be involved, I wasn’t worried about it. If it happened, it happened. If it didn’t, it didn’t.
Then March 3 came. No DNS requests to point the domain to a new server. And then the hosting expired. And then it was gone. And I don’t mean “well, it’s just not available on the internet”. I mean, it’s gone. Server decommissioned and everything. Database? Gone.
But, someone somewhere said you shut it down over Politics and Religion!
No. I didn’t shut it down for any reason whatsoever. I passed it off. But I was passing to (insert any receiver we’ve hated because of too many dropped passes) and it was dropped.
Yeah. I fucking hated the P&R Forum. I’m not sure anyone should be surprised by that. I hated creating it way back in 2003 or so. But some people HAVE to talk about it and it would pop up here and there in threads. And I’d have to remind people that we really should avoid these things on our Razorback message board. But you know, people are going to do what they do…which forced me to create the P&R board so then I could tell people to take their discussion there and get out of the game thread or whatever.
And it was awful from the get-go. I never understood how people that choose to gather around a certain topic, the Razorbacks, could spew such venom at each other. But when you talk about politics and religion with people, you’re either slapping each other on the back about being on the right side or you’re blue in the face arguing with someone that will hear none of your words. And then you lose respect for each other. Then you let that spill over into non P&R topics. It’s really basically uncontrollable. The P&R board was running a close second to the main forum in traffic. I didn’t want a P&R site.
I laid out a plan a couple of years ago to make it invisible to anyone that had never posted in it. So new people wouldn’t know it existed unless someone told them about it and they could request access. That meant querying the database to find the userids and then somehow create a usergroup of those ids. And then handling the requests to get in. And deal with the backlash of hiding the forum. It was quickly obvious that this was 100% more work than I wanted to put in on it.
But yeah. I’m liberal in politics and an atheist in religion. The antithesis of what the P&R forum became. I disagreed strongly with the prevailing opinions that I read in there, but it truly matters none in the fate of the board.
Bullshit, Your Snowflake Ass Shut Us Out!
No. Remember that part above where the transfer of the hosting from my account to another couldn’t be done? And I went ahead and organized the fundraising for another year? So don’t even fucking say that I did anything based on my political views. I could have done that shit years ago and didn’t. At any point, I could have just let the dedicated server hosting end without reminding anyone. Poof. Oh my bad.
So Let’s Get Woopig Back Up and Running!
This is the part people need to understand. If I were interested and was migrating the site to a new server because I hadn’t completely lost interest, I’d have done the following:
- backup the code
- backup the database
- get a new server
- setup the server. Python, MySQL, PHP, Apache, user accounts
- restore the code
- restore the database
- tweak all the broken shit
But since I had ZERO interest in any of that, I told the only person that supported Woopig from a technical side that I had ZERO interest in doing so and he said he’d take care of it. He found someone that would take care of details and such, as few as they were. Mainly, he was the largest contributor to the server fund year after year. By a lot. I asked for a GoDaddy account to transfer the domain to and never got one. I figured at some point, a domain transfer request would show up in my inbox. It didn’t.
I don’t fault the technical guy for not knowing what all to do. I know he reached out to the guy that set up the server we were on asking if he had a couple of hours to migrate. Server setup guy said it would be way more than a couple of hours and sent a series of text messages of what to do. No response. I always assumed the money guy would just pay a GoDaddy resource to do the work. He didn’t.
Anyway, the point is to my knowledge, none of those bullets above were done. And if none of the bullets were done, then there was no database backup. Creating a post inserts a row into a database. If the database isn’t backed up and downloaded regularly, then you have lost all of the database content (posts). The database backup was a regularly scheduled job I created on the server…so it was getting backed up. I even think there was backup and download functionality in the Forum Admin area. But I wasn’t downloading any of them. Apparently, neither was anyone else.
I Hear You, So Let’s Get Woopig Back Up and Running!
There’s no content to recover. And if there’s no content to recover, then there’s no Woopig. And…there’s no content to recover. This is the answer to the question “How does Woopig end?”
So What Does the Woopig Crowd Do Now?
Someone created something on Reddit. I know there was a rarely-used Discord channel that I left a few days ago. I think there’s an effort to create a new board on a new domain.
Since everything is gone, I’m keeping the domain. Maybe I make a post occasionally about some memory or something. But whatever it is, it will simply be what the fuck ever I want to write. And no, I won’t turn comments on.
So That’s That…
Yep. I’m not trying to be a dick about it. It could have lived. It didn’t. Not by my choice.
