Recent Site Outage: An apology and explanation

Where do I begin?  I was going to start out with some humor, saying the site shut down due to lack of readers reviewing stories, but figured that it was a bad joke and wouldn't go over well... Oh wait, I just said it anyway, didn't I?  LOL!  No, really it wasn't that, but our authors always love their reviews, so if you are enjoying being able to read again, please make sure you also review!!!

First off, I want to thank all of our users who commented via FB and supported us during the last 24+ hours.  It was a very harrowing experience for us, as I'm sure it was for you, and having you guys behind us supporting us made the difference.  The fact that you were all behind us as we worked hard to get the site back up made a very stressful day a little less stressful.  I honestly can't express in mere words how extraordinarily grateful I am for everyone's patience and kind words!  Once again, you've shown we truly do have the best users out there.  My love goes out to you all!

Secondly, I apologize and would like to explain what happened.  This never should have happened, we recognize that and take full responsibility for it.  It was our bad.  The last time we renewed the domain, we renewed it for 5 years.  As things happen, times change, email addresses change and log in information gets lost.  As such, we did not get any renewal notices about the domain expiring and it honestly slipped from our minds until the site went down out of nowhere yesterday morning.

I was first notified about 11:00ish and it took me a few to confirm as I was one of the users that because of how funky DNS can be didn't have any issues. Once I confirmed it, I started making calls.  GoDaddy takes customer privacy VERY seriously (as they should...) and wouldn't let me even pay the bill with out being able to confirm I was who I was. It was extremely frustrating and even a supervisor couldn't/wouldn't override it.  Though I have to say, I'm very proud of myself as I didn't yell or cuss them out once... while the line was live!

Long story short, since the form I filled out to get the information updated could take up to 3 days to hear back on, DemonGoddess and I made the decision to purchase an alternate domain for the time being and she started working on the tedious process of changing the hundreds of files needed to make sure everything links correctly.  Normally, we should've been back running in a few hours, but because apparently Murphy was having a bad day, things went wonky and we had to get Nexcess involved.   As we were in the process of fixing those errors, we finally were able to get the domain renewed.  We did wait a bit, just to confirm it was back up 100% and then we had to go back through and put everything back to how it was!  Talk about time consuming!!!

At the time that I'm writing this, we are 99% operational.  If you are experiencing errors, please make sure you have cleared your cache and cookies.  If that hasn't resolved your issues, please be patient.  DNS may be a bit wonky the next few days and cause a handful of errors, plus there are a couple of files that are still misdirecting and causing issues accessing a few sub-domain/archives.  I know it's not the best experience when things don't work, but we are working to restore the site 100% as quickly as possible.

Just as a warning, if you are experiencing issues still, please understand that until we know the site is back up 100% we will be referring users back to this news post.  Once we are sure that the site is functional, we will at that point troubleshoot as normal!  I will post here and on Facebook when we know!

Again, thank you for the support and patience!