- of what happened to the website and message boards,
- why I have lost most of the information that was on the website,
- why there's only posts up to February 2003 and
- why ardan-nights.org was completely offline from around October 2005 until a couple of months ago.
I must admit that I've forgotten and or don't entirely know what happened, but this is more or less how it went.
From about October 1999 (after the original MEO was cancelled) Ardan Nights trundled along, living on PlayerVault and also as a Yahoo Group. I joined up sometime in 2001 I think and I gave it a slightly more permanent home in 2002. In February of that year I registered ardan-nights.org
Originally, the website and forums lived in my user account on a college society machine and was then moved to a properly hosted machine which a friend of mine owned and was willing to provide me free access to. I'm not entirely sure when that happened, but I think (in part looking at the Web Archive) that it was sometime around February 2003.
The site lived happily there until its disappearance in mid 2005. By this stage Ardan Nights had died as a project. Even by early 2004, the heyday had been and gone. An attempted restart and reinvigoration "A New Dawn" in June 2004 never really went anywhere.
By this stage, I had finished college and started working in October 2004, so I didn't have the time nor to be honest the energy or enthusiasm to try and do anything with Ardan Nights. The project had died and I was willing to let it stay that way.
At first when the site disappeared, I didn't really notice. When I did, I thought we had been hacked and then I thought it was just a technical problem with the settings on the hosting server. As some of you may have seen, ardan-nights.org was pointing at a website of an adult nature for a few weeks at that time.
While it was a technical setting, the bigger problem that I was unaware of at the time, was that my friend had finished up with the server. The web hosting company that he had joined up with was now the complete owner of it and being a guy along for a free ride and having left college and hence being out of touch with my friend, I didn't find this out until much later. In fact it was too late.
Also, at this time (mid to late 2005), I was making my preparations for a trip to New Zealand, so while I got the site back online just before I left, it was only a stop-gap measure. I left for New Zealand in October 2005 and shortly thereafter the site disappeared completely, as did my user account and all the information that was stored on the server. Again, as I was still unaware of what was happening, I thought it was just a temporary technical hitch like before. Traipsing around NZ, I didn't have much time to look after ardan-nights.org, so I left it for when I got back home. I also thought I had all the information backed up on my pc at home so didn't figure it as a major problem, unfortunately I was wrong.
When I did find out what had happened, some time in 2006, there was nothing that I could do and I had no real intention of doing anything. I still owned the domain name though. So when it came up for renewal this year, Ardan Nights finally got my attention once more and I started thinking about it again. NWN2 was on its way and might be worth lookin at. But I also knew that I didn't have the time to restart the project, so I left it lie for a while.
Meanwhile, my own personal website had been moved shortly before I left for NZ on to a different server that I was renting with a group of friends. A couple of months ago we moved to another server and I had to change my DNS settings, when I had figured out how I could do this, I thought I may as well get ardan-nights.org working again, so I stuck the one page site on my personal website space and got my email working.
A few weeks later and I've been getting some email from various people to my old vildar email address. gforce99 and Grump Strongarm both encouraged my interest in the project again and striking while the iron is hot after having one particular conversation with gforce99 I stuck the boards back online.
And here we are.
