Question The hell happened last night?

well... first of all, the site DOES have a off-location status page. you can get to it at status.whateleyacademy.net ... its hosted off my google domain instead of the site server, so it is almost guaranteed to be accessible, even if the site itself it not available. There was a time, several years ago, when the status page was common knowledge... because between hackers and lack of admin support and other issues, we were down almost as often as we were up. But since I've been running the site on a virtual server in the Joomla format, we have only had two down time - one for about six hours, one for three... both of which were associated with software updates that went awry and required time and effort to restore from. 9 hours of downtime total in almost three years of continuous operation is... pretty good. Also... I specifically don't have my email address plastered on the site for contact purposes because I DON'T intend to cater to every little request that people want to put in lap because they want something done differently or can't figure something out. That's what the suggestions part of the forums is for. For emergencies.. there IS a Site Contact thread stickied in the Announcements/News forum that let's you know how to reach me. But if you think about it... for times when things are down, neither a forums post or contact buttons matter... because "things are down" means you can't use either anyway. So like almost every site in existance, if its actually down, there's no accessible way to contact the admin anyway. My alternate site status things works around that, but only if you know it exists beforehand.

Second, There is no full time admin staff. The site being inaccessible for a couple hours is worth noting, but NOT panic worthy. Even if someone happened to try to log in the moment a problem happened, emailed me and I happened to be awake and at my desk with time to work on it... a solution could be hours off. But more likely, if someone had to email me to let me know there is a problem, I'm working and its going to be anywhere from 4-10 hours before I'll even sit down at a computer to start solving the problem. Bigcloset asks for 3-5k dollars in donation support in addition to ad revenue and book sales, etc to have 24/7 technical support / admin / moderation. This site runs off less than $400 / month in Patreon to cover virtual server, domain, software... all costs. I'm willing to quit my 'day job' and do nothing but run and improve the site but that's going to take more than $400 / month.

Third.. the whateleyacademy.org thing was bit of joke from the early days. it never got taken down and the owner does't really follow the site anymore so....


Finally... what happened last night was that the domain names were supposed to autorenew. For whatever reason, they did not and I had an email in my inbox this morning saying so, that required me to manually click a web site button to approve the charge. During however many hours it was from the time of expiraton to when I clicked Approve, we were accessible via IP address only.

Downside to an automated domain name renewal not happening is that you don't even know it didn't renew until it fails. I got all the email that said it would be renewing. It happens the same time every year. And then the email saying it was no longer active came in after probably a half day of it being inactive. Instead of in the middle of the night when it 'ended'. And then, even though I manually paid (via my phone even) as soon as I got the mail... it was still after my phone had been off for a couple hours to avoid interruptions during a performance. Who knows how long after that the site was actually accessible again... because of propagation...

Are you kidding, we're actually nearing the one political topic that we all agree on. That Cthulu would make a better political figure than anyone currently in office.

But you are right, we do need to keep the politics sidelined, please.

the greatest lie any politician ever tells you: "I am the person you want representing you."

I think its more that they just don't have any functional infrastructure... so they don't need government agencies to run anything. And where they do, the Church just pushes for things to happen.