Hello! I was the one who fixed it.

Well it wasn’t just me, to be fair. I would have never been able to without @fireflowersims help and HugeLunatics trust in both of us. Thank you to both of them for their work and thank you @teaaddictyt for reaching out and doing the more public communication.

I’m super happy I got the chance to work to fix it. It wasn’t an easy undertaking. It seemed like every little thing would cause more errors, I fixed one and another thing broke. But now it seems stable, finally.

A lot of technical stuff below the cut, beware.

I need everybody to stop, pause, make some really tight fists with their hands, now shake them out.

Now breathe in, all the way. Hold it - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - now breathe out. Now do that twice more.

There are still efforts going on behind the scenes to get GOS back online (and Sims 2 Artists).

New hosting has been secured. The website php needs upgrading and this has not been working, but people are still working on it.

I know its hard when things happen and you don't know what's going on. But please, everyone, just calm down. Instead of panicking, jumping to conclusions, making angry posts, just chill, wait, breathe. Be kind, ask what's happening without getting mad.

I'm breathing normally, and can count down from 5, thank you! Still doesn't change the fact HL went from "there is no war in ba sing se" to "gos is dead and no one wanted to save it" while going radio silent on all the places people could reach her out (except MTS ig), and people where rightfully pissed off by it.

It's not "getting mad" it's acknowledging someone is responding to some valid questions (over GOS' situation) with sarcasm, and it's not really an appropriate response. Why can't HL just take the blame on this one, understand people are rightfully calling her bluff, and do a PSA herself since -you know- it all went sour after her response.

@elvisgrace

Okay so I went to an interview for a company that makes comedy shows in the UK and a friend who had a little more experience than me was also being interviewed, although I didn't know this.

And we discussed my work in the TV/film industry at this point and I had only ever worked on set and this job would be in office which meant I was unlikely to get the job because the type of work is very different.

Until we got to the "tell me about life outside of work" section of the interview and I mentioned a few hobbies and stuff and it was completely normal.

Until I mentioned my Simblr...

And I didn't go into huge nerdy detail, I said "Oh I also use the game the sims to make a mini soap opera" and the producer interviewing me had never heard of such a thing before and asked me to elaborate.

"Well the game comes with a camera you can move around, and over the last 15 years people who play the game have been modding content you can download into it, so you could make a historical drama or a scifi, anything really. And photoshop helps with any other limitations"

Interviewer was really intrested in the modding part so I told her about people I spoke with on various platforms who either made stuff for me or helped me find somthing that I asked for, always for free.

And the thing is, in office when making TV shows you need to make friends and contacts to be able to get things sorted on a short time scale, you'll need to have things custom made and you'll need video and photo editing skills.

All of which I had accidently mentioned I do within the sims community, without knowing it I had a transferable skill.

My friend ended up getting hired because she had the confirmed skills needed but then called me up and said they'd adjusted the budget and would like to hire me as well on a shorter contract and admitted it was the sims talk that made it impossible for them to not want me.

Back in 2023, @hugelunatic-deactivated20260510 gave @simnostalgia shit for archiving/scraping GoS “just in case,” citing concerns over scraping, bandwidth, and preservation itself.

Now GoS and Sims2Artists are suddenly gone, and people are left scrambling through remnants, mirrors, and whatever archives survived.

That is exactly why preservation matters.

You cannot discourage archival efforts and then act surprised when people are upset that massive parts of Sims 2 history vanished with little warning. You also cannot get angry over backlash when there was never any clear, direct communication to the wider community.

People were explicitly told that if GoS was truly at risk of going down, there would be an announcement.

No real community-wide warning was ever given.

And honestly, this is where the messaging becomes incredibly frustrating.

We were told:

hosting costs were manageable,

the site was not going anywhere as long as ads/donations covered most costs,

out-of-pocket expenses were still within budget,

scraping was mainly an issue because it increased bandwidth/server load,

“if I were not willing/able to continue, then there would be an announcement,”

and later posts even made it sound like things were functioning again after the PHP fixes.

Most people interpreted that as stability returning.

So yes, people are understandably confused and frustrated now, because the messaging for years was essentially: “Things are annoying, but manageable.”

Not: “Hey. This is serious. Archive what you can now. I may be done.”

And no, buried technical posts about PHP upgrades and drive failures are not the same thing as directly communicating that to the wider community.

I literally had to use archived Tumblr pages just to reconstruct the timeline before speaking on this.

And honestly, we are lucky @simnostalgia even had the foresight to preserve as much as they did back in 2023, because otherwise even more would likely be gone forever or nearly impossible to piece back together. But that archive is still missing huge amounts of resources, attachments, images, updates, and years of content added afterward.

What makes this even more frustrating is that @simnostalgia received backlash for trying to preserve the site in the first place. At this point, I honestly hope they feel vindicated, because this situation is exactly why archival efforts matter.

gos wasn't just those cc links, it was two decades worth of forum activity, some of it by now dead members of the community that we will never see again, torched without a word. to leave that site in limbo for so long when people will willing to step up and help, and to attack the users trying to save what they could of it, is absolutely unfathomable to me. i may have not been fully active as a personality in the community, but i was literally raised on gos. to see it treated with such disregard and contempt for the people on it by someone we all respected was heartbreaking.

TheSims twitter: Sulsul Simmers! We hope you have a very Merry SIMS-mas!