Hello everyone–
I want to preface this by saying I hate these sorts of announcements. I believe it's an admin’s job to maintain the privacy of their members, even when someone breaks the rules and needs to be banned. So I’ve always found callout style posts to be a bit tacky.
Unfortunately, the actions of one person has put the entire community and your creative work at risk, and now I have to write this.
Two-ish years ago, shroudweavers was created by a group of long-time writing friends. We all contributed ideas, lore entries, and labor to get the site up and running. It was always a group effort, and the creation of the site cannot be contributed to one person.
During construction, we trusted Toska to secure the domain and set up the forum software.
Toska instead hired another person to do this work for him. That person set things up incorrectly, and introduced errors into the system. I, along with our friend Logan, took on the extra coding work to get the site operational. We moved on, and Toska stayed on staff. However, over the next year, Toska continued to be dishonest about the amount of work he was doing.
He was given third, fourth, fifth chances in perpetuity. We spent hours of our hobby time coaching him, asking him to collaborate, and cleaning up his mistakes. Eventually, after seeing no changes in his behaviour, it became clear that Toska was not interested in working with everyone, and was only sticking around for his own hubris.
I made the difficult decision to let him go from the staff. We thought the parting was amicable, and encouraged him to stay as a player and continue writing with everyone. Toska gave us his verbal confirmation that he would not lock us out of the domain or impede our ability to continue maintaining the forum.
You can probably guess where this is going - that last conversation turned out to be another one of Toska’s broken promises. On April 14, our access to the domain (the .com part of the site) was revoked by Toska. On April 19, Toska removed our ability to use the forum's admin panel.
What Toska does not know is that the coding problems introduced by his botched setup are fatal. It required regular maintenance which now cannot be performed, because Toska does not know how to code, never did, and has been passing off other’s work as his own this entire time.
I cannot speak to his intentions, but I can tell you that his actions would have crashed the website and permanently lost everyone’s writing. Under no circumstances was I going to let that happen.
While Toska played 254 hours of Slay the Spire 2, I studied the blade.
I’ve known about the errors for a long time, and have been working on a fix for them in the background. I got a new forum license, a new domain, and have been backing up the database regularly in case of a critical failure. And, unlike Toska, I understand that running a website is never a solo endeavor. The rest of the staff pulled together and manually saved every post on shroudweavers.com that would have been lost to the arrogance of one man.
Thanks to Kris, Silence, Garuda, Lucy and others who helped with the move, all of your creative work has been recovered.
The new site domain is shroudweavers.io
You’re already here. I can’t wait to keep writing with everyone.
I want to preface this by saying I hate these sorts of announcements. I believe it's an admin’s job to maintain the privacy of their members, even when someone breaks the rules and needs to be banned. So I’ve always found callout style posts to be a bit tacky.
Unfortunately, the actions of one person has put the entire community and your creative work at risk, and now I have to write this.
Two-ish years ago, shroudweavers was created by a group of long-time writing friends. We all contributed ideas, lore entries, and labor to get the site up and running. It was always a group effort, and the creation of the site cannot be contributed to one person.
During construction, we trusted Toska to secure the domain and set up the forum software.
Toska instead hired another person to do this work for him. That person set things up incorrectly, and introduced errors into the system. I, along with our friend Logan, took on the extra coding work to get the site operational. We moved on, and Toska stayed on staff. However, over the next year, Toska continued to be dishonest about the amount of work he was doing.
He was given third, fourth, fifth chances in perpetuity. We spent hours of our hobby time coaching him, asking him to collaborate, and cleaning up his mistakes. Eventually, after seeing no changes in his behaviour, it became clear that Toska was not interested in working with everyone, and was only sticking around for his own hubris.
I made the difficult decision to let him go from the staff. We thought the parting was amicable, and encouraged him to stay as a player and continue writing with everyone. Toska gave us his verbal confirmation that he would not lock us out of the domain or impede our ability to continue maintaining the forum.
You can probably guess where this is going - that last conversation turned out to be another one of Toska’s broken promises. On April 14, our access to the domain (the .com part of the site) was revoked by Toska. On April 19, Toska removed our ability to use the forum's admin panel.
What Toska does not know is that the coding problems introduced by his botched setup are fatal. It required regular maintenance which now cannot be performed, because Toska does not know how to code, never did, and has been passing off other’s work as his own this entire time.
I cannot speak to his intentions, but I can tell you that his actions would have crashed the website and permanently lost everyone’s writing. Under no circumstances was I going to let that happen.
While Toska played 254 hours of Slay the Spire 2, I studied the blade.
I’ve known about the errors for a long time, and have been working on a fix for them in the background. I got a new forum license, a new domain, and have been backing up the database regularly in case of a critical failure. And, unlike Toska, I understand that running a website is never a solo endeavor. The rest of the staff pulled together and manually saved every post on shroudweavers.com that would have been lost to the arrogance of one man.
Thanks to Kris, Silence, Garuda, Lucy and others who helped with the move, all of your creative work has been recovered.
The new site domain is shroudweavers.io
You’re already here. I can’t wait to keep writing with everyone.
Now, onto the technical stuff:
- We were always going to move to a new sever host and get a new license, because our forum’s setup was not done correctly initially.
- It was my hope that this transition would be seamless and we could remain as shroudweavers.com, but Toska’s (deliberate) actions have made that impossible.
- Awkwardly, the .com domain will stay up, but it is unmaintained. Updates, announcements, and community events will continue on the .io site
- Your original login and password will work on the new site
- Some attachments didn’t roll over correctly - if you see a broken link or image on your own post, simply edit the post and re-upload the thing. If you see a broken attachment in someone else’s post, let them know so they can do the same!
- Unfortunately, I couldn’t recover any unposted saved drafts. If you had something in progress on the .com, you’ll need to log in one last time to copy it over.
- Many of the links had to be manually updated to the .io domain. Please let us know if you find a broken link
- The hogs ran away…
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