my take on the GOS stuff is that for the past two months I have been trying to keep in the know about the state of GOS since me and my friend group love GOS. i can tell you truthfully that HL tumblr was down for at least two months because we were all confused as to what was going on as there was no information from hugelunatic and I was checking their blog religiously for updates, and they were scarce.
if the situation was so dire, Hugelunatic should have reached out. There is no, oh maybe they did, because how the fuck can we tell when they delete their only universal form of communication with the community months before the site died. and their last post we can see on the internet archive states no technical problems, only hosting costs
why? how are we supposed to understand the situation, how are we supposed to help if you apparently vague post about the situation, and then deleted your blog soon after. everyone is rushing to their defense and I get it but this is what we have seen from HL so far,
vague posts about the status of gos
no communication over discord either after their blog was gone (HL is in a couple of large servers, I see them in some I am either in or was in)
the deletion of their tumblr with no heads up
mts replies showing zero compassion or care towards the fact they were basically holding other peoples cc and information hostage for months and did not once reach out. if they did, it definitely was not clear enough as we wouldn't be in this situation.
if hugelunatic cared about the future of GOS there would have been so many posts everywhere about it and people would have scrambled to help. look how the mediafire purge got everyone panicking and moving. why did we not care enough for GOS?
i have some proof GOS was stable back in february
but on hugelunatic tumblr, last ever snapshot on the archive the month after, Hugelunatic states the site is okay, just to disable adblock.
all HL said was to disable adblock to fund the site. the main issue they point out here was they needed a liiiittle bit of help funding because thats what you do with a forum made for the love of the community. there was no indication whatsoever that there were huge technical problems that would inevitably lead to site closure.
had we have known this, there would have been archival efforts everywhere. sadly that is not the case and we are left with only content up to 2023/4 on the internet archive.
also, the fact HL states that the wayback machine should be the best bet, not everyone uses a plugin that saves pages. so stuff is still lost regardless.
tldr i think HL should have stated it had gotten to a point where inevitably the site would close. if they had, the internet archive did not save a post saying this and their tumblr was gone quickly in the time period from march until now. the community is known for its heavy archival efforts and the fact we never got a chance to archive sucks
