A Land Far Away

Just saying that over the last two years one of the big hot button issues at alfa has been player retention. somehow despite the fact that it is constantly put out there as an issue..their is no attempt I can see to make it easy for members current or past to continue to follow the Alfa forms from .org to .info, just want to say thanks for not using info that was supposed to be so members could be contacted via their E-mail..makes me feel wonderfully welcomed and wanted.

We are still trying to recover the .org domain. If anyone has a way of contacting Murky please help us out!

Unfortunately, any host change is going to be slow on the updates to .org-- Murky continues to own the alandfaraway.org domain and refuses to yield it to the community, but does (slowly) update the records to point to our latest hosting; the initial update happened yesterday on account of those slow responses, and it wasn't done correctly, so it will likely be some days before the new host's location fully propagates. We needed to host something in the mean time, so using the only other domain we own seemed like the obvious path.

I would expect that Foam is owed an apology for this adorable little tantrum.

I personally have dealt with something like this a long time ago. The answer is simple. We work to move all of our pointing and such to a domain that is controlled by the community.

Let the .org point to it as well, when it does finally, and advertising won't be lost, and old members will still be able to find us. But it will happen again and if we migrate back to using .org, we will just have just have the same pain all over.

• We switched central servers from OVH to Microsoft Azure.
• I have no access to the .org domain, and had to wait on Murky to update the domain.
• DNS is a pain in the ass.

Things are (slowly) returning to .org. We'll switch the website/forum back to .org when it is stable for everyone. Right now it works for me, and Zelk, and a handful of other people, but not everyone. The .info domain will remain as a "backbone" domain. Our SSH, ADL, etc. will point to that as a safeguard, since we have no control over the .org domain.

It's a transition that will take some time, because that's just how the technology works. I can't flip a switch and magically coordinate multiple people and multiple ISPs to work everything out in an instant.

In good news, thanks to the research done before the switch, we're now using about half the money we used to. $200-something/year down to ~$120/year for our central server host. That leaves donation money to go towards something else (web design, etc.), or to be stretched out.

alandfaraway.org redirects automatically to alandfaraway.info for me. If it doesn't work for you, I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do about that. Once we're confident that everyone has access to alandfaraway.org, we'll switch back to using it. It just takes time.

Yes seriously people, this is not IA's fault. Since ALFA does not own its domain there's no choice but to deal with the owner whenever we move hosting (which we were forced to do, as the Euro host was going to be taken down - even if we kept the same hosting company we'd still have to migrate accounts and pay a boatload of money (they stopped offering the deal ALFA was using a while ago iirc). Still waiting on that apology to our admin from the OP. Please ask questions first and hurl accusations once you have all the facts. I don't like it when it happens to me and I don't like it when it happens to anyone else here.

I did send an email to what I assume is Murky, from the domain record. There is also a phone number but I chickened out on that avenue. I did not ask about the domain, only wrote a note to say hi and such, basically to verify that the email was still good. Alas, I have not received a reply.

Perhaps the move should be made permanent so the domain as well as the hosting is in ALFAs hands, rather than continuing to rely on a long gone member to keep the domain name going?

Unfortunately, the original alandfaraway.net seems to be a 'valuable' domain name and currently carries a price tag of over $3000 US.

We have .info-- it's just .org that Murky is holding and unwilling to give to the community.

Zelknolf wrote:We have .info-- it's just .org that Murky is holding and unwilling to give to the community.

She works with the community, let's not paint her as a bad guy unless she bought the domain using ALFA donation money.

We don't pay her. She pays for it herself.

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Probably just name confusion. alandfaraway.org is registered to a "Kim" -- which is almost always a woman's name in the U.S. (there just aren't a lot of Joakims over here)

Or a Korean name.

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Since we are discussing this, I point out our .info is held by a current member.

I suggest we move things to a corporate entity - like a social club - for continuity's sake.

http://www.ehow.com/how_4895737_incorpo ... -club.html

FYI may be a bit of a dead horse, this topic was last raised by Mikayla some years ago iirc.