IPBFree

[ariesness]

As many of you may have discovered by now, ipbfree sites are down. This is not scheduled maintenance. This is not temporary downtime. This is permanent and, at the present moment, irreversible. According to one of the ipbfree admins, ipbfree is gone forever. I know many of you in this community used ipbfree, and I for one am truly sorry about the situation you're in. RPGU will do whatever we can to help.

An Unofficial Refugee site has been set up for admins and members of ipbfree boards to reconnect and find answers. There are a lot of rumors flying around, and I'd like to encourage everyone to stay calm and keep an open mind until we know more about what happened. We will let you know when we hear more.


FORUM HOSTS
Several forum hosts are making special offers to ipbfree refugees while they search for a new place to call home. Please use the links to check out the details of each offer.

CJink, which is very similar to IPBFree, is offering $15 credit for ad removal (which is roughly 75,000 page views). Zetaboards is also offering 3 months of ad-free service. Invision Power Services, which created the software that ipbfree used, is also offering a $15 credit toward the purchase of IPS products. IPS is not a free service, please note.

Other Hosts:
InvisionFree
ProBoards
Forumotion


ACCESSING YOUR BOARD VIA CACHE
It may be possible for you to access your site (temporarily) through a cache or archive site. You will not be able to update anything, but you might be able to grab templates, character bios, or other important info.

You can use Google's cache system, by typing this into your address bar. (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yoururl) Please be sure to replace yoururl with, well, your URL. To access individual pages, you may have to search for page and hit "cache". Or you can try searching with the url in quotation marks.

You may also have some luck with Archive.org.


Your Adverts/Skins Here
We will not be removing any ipbfree sites or skins from RPGU (unless you contact a staff member directly). As far as directory ads go, please feel free to use them to direct your members to a regrouping site or cbox. You can post updates as much as you'd like for the time being. We will not remove any ipbfree adverts or skins for at least a month, while everyone works to recover and regroup.



If there's anything we can do to help out anyone who's been effected by the demise of ipbfree, please let me know. I'll do my best to pass along any information or updates I find.

[+ Abby]

Manda, what does this mean for all the rest of the free forum hosting sites? Like IF, JCink and the rest that use the same software? Is this strictly an IPBFREE issue or will this affect the others?

I'm asking because I was told that Acornrack was also gone?

[ariesness]

To the best of my knowledge, Acorn Rack is a separate issue and happened a couple of months ago. AR was closed voluntarily for financial reasons, I believe. And while this incident with iPBFree might appear similar (ie- everything goes down at once with a massive loss of data), it's just not in the same boat.

As far as whether admins of other boards should be worried that their host is next, I don't know. The iPBFree staff are unable to say pretty much anything for "legal reasons". And without knowing for sure why iPBFree went down, it's next to impossible to know if we should expect something similar for other free hosts.

Yes, it's true that InvisionFree, cJink, iPBFree, and several others use the IPB 1.3 Final. But that was always free (for the most part) and open-sourced , and is still open for use through Creative Commons. It seems unlikely that Invision Power Services would suddenly decide after so many years that they wanted to shut down all free hosts using their old (seeing as they're now into IPB 3.x) software.

However, if anything, this situation should teach everyone that there is no such thing as permanence in the virtual world. And that everyone, admins and members, should regularly back up their data. Personally, I would encourage everyone- whether free, paid, or self-hosted- to back everything up in its current condition and form some kind of contingency plan of contacting members/friends/etc should their forums go down, whether though Facebook/Twitter, a companion website, or good ol' mass emailing.