The old site was effectively closed down by the domain name owner, taking all the members details and their technical contributions with it. We can never get this back in total because the domain name account and password were only known to the site owner and he is incommunicado.
I am determined that this is not going to happen to this site.
Next week I will sort out all the contact details, account names and passwords of everything to do with the management of the site and circulate them to all the admin and moderator team members so that we have a business recovery plan in place if anything happens to me (like me throwing a strop and going off in a huff). There is a risk in doing this because any one of us could change the password and then we too could do a runner.
However, we have to trust people to do the right thing.
As an aside, an extremely popular and very successful and long-standing Yahoo astronomy group I used to belong to went down the tubes because the administrators left over time and were never replaced and then the group owner became very ill, lost touch with the members and no-one could revive the site. Luckily the existing members all moved to a new, well managed site and one member had made sure that he cloned the site on a regular basis but even so, the pain was palpable.
Brian (who never wants that to happen to anyone in this forum)
