Forum closed. Need help figuring out why.

Good afternoon,

I recently purchased a particular motorcycle and visited the forum: www.silverwing600.com which seems to have been the largest community for this cycle and it was closed to new members. I cloned the site so I would have some technical help for my motorcycle. The forum was recently closed and the admins are freaking out, thinking I had something to do with it. I was following the rabbit hole and it appears that the account was closed or wasn't paid etc. The longest running admin of the site stated the following:

Hello Mark

Quite suddenly and inexplicably the Silverwing600 forum has ceased to exist. Could you have done something when you cloned the forum? If so, kindly restore the forum to its previous state.

Regards

Tim

I have no idea what happened to this site but if you could message the owner, technical contact "Jeff", or send me a message as to why and what we can do from here to reactivate it, I'd appreciate it.

Regards

Do you mean that you let the domain name expire?  What was the original link?

Hello @phenomenon,

The forum silverwing600.forumotion.com (silverwing600.com) was deleted by its founder on 13 May 2018.

Regards,
Shadow

Hi Shadow,

Thank you for your reply. Is there any way he can reactivate it and transfer the account to another admin? The founder apparently didn't tell his admins about this and they are upset at me,, thinking I had something to do with this..

Unfortunately not, the founder is the only decision-maker in this matter. He is the only one who can restore this forum.

Regards,
Shadow

Shadow, OK thanks. That's good to know that he can reactivate it. If he chooses not to can he forward the domain to a new forum should he decide to? I know nothing about forumotion, forgive me.

So you want the domain name?

Hi SLGray,

Well, I'm trying to offer the Admins some type of resolution. I don't technically want anything. I can't imagine why the founder went AWOL like this without telling his admins why. If the founder is unwilling to reactivate the forum for the guys (I'm not sure if he is willing or not), I was thinking maybe he or someone could at least forward the domain name to a new forum. Whether that entails taking ownership of the name, I don't know or care. TBH, I'm already way more involved in this than I should be considering they think I did this.. What would have to be done to obtain ownership of this domain, or at least get it pointing to my forum I'm setting up for the guys until we all figure something out? I have no idea how domain ownership etc. works here. From what I gather, forumotion retains the domain, not the founder.

Regards

phenomenon wrote:Hi SLGray,

Well, I'm trying to offer the Admins some type of resolution. I don't technically want anything. I can't imagine why the founder went AWOL like this without telling his admins why. If the founder is unwilling to reactivate the forum for the guys (I'm not sure if he is willing or not), I was thinking maybe he or someone could at least forward the domain name to a new forum. Whether that entails taking ownership of the name, I don't know or care. TBH, I'm already way more involved in this than I should be considering they think I did this.. What would have to be done to obtain ownership of this domain, or at least get it pointing to my forum I'm setting up for the guys until we all figure something out? I have no idea how domain ownership etc. works here. From what I gather, forumotion retains the domain, not the founder.

Regards

Hi,

If the founder has shutdown the forum then there is nothing we can do. The domain name will still be linked to that forum until it expires.

Founders can do whatever they want with their forums.  They do not have tell the reasons why,

Can we consider this solved?

SLGray, I'm not saying they can't. I was just trying to find out what happened to it and offer some resolution to the admins whom worked 8 years to build a community that was inexplicably shut down for no reason.

Thank you for filling me in as to what happened, hopefully they can do something with the clone I made of it just before it went 301. I was concerned for a minute that my webscrape of the forum hit a bandwidth quota limit or the like.

Yes sir, I'd consider it solved. Thank you for your time.