As most of you have already noticed, the forum was unavailable, was going to take over after decided she would not continue hosting the forums on her server anymore. We are grateful for Alley's help over all this time in which she's spent many hours to improve, fix and maintain Discovery.
King Boo has now declined to fully instigate the planned migration to his machine so we have had to change plans. We are currently setting up a new PayPal Account which will administrate for the time being. We will go back to a donation based system as we will have to rent two new servers. One for the game and one for the forums. We will get assistance on the tech side from and who will do their best to keep Discovery running for the future. The current estimated costs for running Discovery are 70,- € per month excluding the set up fees we will have to pay.
This will put disco back into the hands of people with the necessary availablity to fullfill their duties. We will keep you updated and informed about any changes.
On an additional note. There is a skype quote spreading around from the OFL chat, which was written in the haze of the ongoing dramalama regarding the situation with Conrad. Needless to say while we are looking into upcoming changes to reduce the amount of input needed on the community and make Discovery enter a state of pseduo autonamy, the quote expressed in the OFL is misleading and does not reflect the current state of the upcoming choices for change.
Once they are agreed on, they will be announced properly and in Admin-Green writing on the forums, not some pseduo-spam chat.
I would like to personally apologize for not putting in enough thought in that quote in the first place and hope that it hasn't cause damage.
As the person that triggered this chain of events, I strongly believe the community deserves a clear and honest answer as to what just happened.
For the better part of the past two years, I have been regularly warning administrators, developers and people that care that as I was getting more and more responsabilities at work, my time for Discovery was equally shortened. For most of the past six months, I have been in a situation where I would have to spend each weekday evening and almost all weekends dealing with discovery matters. As you can suspect, this can only work for so long until it simply cease to be feasible. I have therefore no choice but to withdraw from Discovery development, administration, management and essentially any responsability in order to force a long due (and long requested on my end) transition of responsabilities to people with more time to happen.
King Boo, whom was supposed to be the second tech admin has accepted a year ago to bear the mantle of handling the administrative aspect of the game box's renting. As most of you know, this has led to a soon complete silence until the forum crash incident, in which he suddenly resurfaced as Discovery's savior and promised to be active once more. He was trusted on this and you have seen the results of this trust. For the past months, way before I started calling him out on his false promises, King Boo has outright refused to communicate with any member of the administration team despite he was seen playing Overwatch for several hours at times. It is simply disrespectful to refuse to even take a minute out of a gameplay session to simply state an intent.
As I am no longer in any capability to fulfill these duties properly and no solution was in sight, I ended up having to force things to happen and for the relevant people to have no choice but sit down and work together on a plan for the future of this community. Thus far, it seems to have done the job as progress is being made. I however do hope this wake up call will reach the ears of those it is meant to shake up, but also that it will reach you and make you think hard about everything you did up until now for Discovery and what you can now do for the better of this community. Discovery is what you, together, shape it to be. It can be a great community if you work hard at it. The question is then, do you care?