So far
We are slowly getting our heads round the system. Mr Black is our codemeister, reluctant sysadmin and a total star, it'd be fair to say we'd be offline without him. We are hoping to take on a couple of contract sysadmins soon to take the load off Mr Black. Two other guys, Mr Blue and SomeOneElse, are playing useful roles. Props.
Second heros are the editors and edadmins who have helped out. It's slightly weird having the old hands telling the new owners that they are ****ing **** up, but that's fair as we are, and we need to be told this stuff.
We've still a long way to go. In the short term our goal is to get payments going for reasons I'll explain in a second. Second, we need docs back but there are issues with that. We need SSL for you paranoid types. We NEED pr0n back (this is a high personal priority for Mr frap frap White ).
Chatting to you guys
What we also need is a better way to chat to you guys. It seems ironic (or paradoxical maybe) that a Usenet indexer like Newzbin2 has no decent chat functionality. We want to set up an NNTP server for the site just for chat (not interested in web forums like Wordpress Joomla etc etc). We could use Inn but it's kinda sucky. In the 5 or 10 spare minutes since restarting the site Mr White has been playing with Stackless Python with the hope of hacking up an NNTP server (see the Stackless website,
http://www.stackless.com/, as to why stackless - but basically huge connection numbers on commodity hardware). Several problems: Mr White is a **** hacker. A **** hacker with no time. Mr Black is too busy. So Mr White is kinda sorta wondering if there are any decent python hackers out there with mad NNTP coding skillz who might be interested in a skunkworks project? PM Mr White.
Finally. Money.
As user Freeop pointed out in a comment pointing to a TorrentFreak article (
http://bit.ly/aTpejW) the MPA have noticed The Resurrection. They are pissed. They are, it seems, coming after us. This is somewhat less than surprising. Our first words were not "OMFG why?!? what have we done?! What can't they just let us be". We realised from the initial planning stages that we would be a target within about 1 day of coming online. We are prepared for our servers to be grabbed: we have multiple backups of the site and its databases both offsite, and on large USB drives distributed among friends. We are preparing backup sites (though these are not yet functional) and we have plan for new domains if our rented domain name gets yanked. We are in fast-flux mode.
The problem we have is money. We have none. Most people have fully paid up credits for many months and don't need to top-up. We have no advertising or other revenue and we have large outgoings in hardware, server hosting costs and contractors fees. Plus we will soon have BIG lawyer bills.
Yea, we're about to beg.
We hope that when we get a payment provider signed up we can take money off you. However, because we are uncertain of the future, if you do need credits we will not permit you to buy more than 3 months credits in case these are lost. What will do is allow donations to costs and legal costs. And we hope you'll dig deep.
Bottom line?
This site may go offline periodically, and there may be some loss of data while this is happening (though we are taking constant backups), and the domain name may change. When we come back your credits will be respected.
So, as the pilots say: "please fasten your seat-belts we are about to hit some turbulence"
Finally finally.
Yea, we know. the MPA are reading this and watching all the IRC channels.