I'll be working hard to ensure that WiKirby is back online and error-free ASAP.
WiKirby is back online and free of the error of being outdated and inaccessible. It's found at wikirby.us now and is on Ringtailed Fox's server.
I had given Vellidragon and a few others my personal address (which I check regularly) and urged them to contact me there in case of any issues. To be fair, Velli did do this on the 9th of August, but the email ended up in my spam folder!
I recall using at least three different emails to contact you by. I can hardly have been the only one given the extent of the email campaign to reach you, and you also most certainly received personal messages, talk page messages and even messages on Facebook. If you are going to say you didn't see a single one of those or they all ended up in the "spam folder", then I'm sorry, but I find it difficult to believe that, not to mention that the problems with WiKirby were clearly visible just from visiting the website itself and would not even have required reading emails.
Anyway, regardless of problems getting in touch with me on this occasion, please rest assured that I'm neither uncontactable nor "gone". Nor am I apathetic to WiKirby's survival.
The situation over the past
year or so has demonstrated otherwise. This is not a new issue. WiKirby's MediaWiki version was so outdated it was a wonder it was even still working and no extension, updating, etc. issues have ever been taken care of. Requests of that ilk have been downright ignored on a regular basis; I have been stuck with telling users of WiKirby that their server-related problems could not be handled because the only person with server access was impossible to reach. Downtimes, to my knowledge, have lasted up to three
weeks in the past; that is not a sign of a healthy website or one that is checked on regularly by someone who has the time and motivation to put into keeping it alive.
I have no plans to discontinue my financial commitment to the project
I thank you for your financial commitment in the past, but the site has moved to Ringtail's server, so it is no longer needed at this point.
I'm sorry, but you have had enough chances to act responsibly, which you did not take. An entire email campaign was launched to get a hold of you - not only spanning this thread and the skype chat, but also some NIWA member wikis like SmashWiki - which you did not respond to (I still have not received a response to any email I sent and it appears to me you did not read any of them before posting this, and your apparently unknowingness that the site had even moved shows to me that you did not even bother to visit wikirby at all, even after renewing the domain, as the entire main page has been changed into a message stating just that). You have acknowledged in the past that you do not have time to take care of the server, yet you have consistently refused to share access to it with anyone to the point that the site had to be moved by exporting the pages as no one had any access to the server. NIWA staff as a whole has been aware of this for much longer; this entire situation has only been the inevitable climax of it all, and the wisest thing you can do (
and which I humbly ask you to do) at this point is
transfer ownership of the domain to Dillion (dkpat, who owns the .us domain) so we can point it to the new (updated and accessible to multiple tech people) site currently found at wikirby.us .
I, along with the rest of NIWA, thank you for your work on WiKirby while you were active (mainly while Axiomist was still alive), but I think it has become evident that the site needs to move on. You are free to continue contributing in whatever way you can, but the site's hosting duties are, at present, best left with someone else.