As many have discussed and speculated, AoEZone has new ownership and I can safely say we do not plan to let this site die!
I wanted to share a little of the backstory regarding what has occurred regarding the site ownership. As everyone knows, _PkZ_ ran this site for many years. Around November of last year, it was sold to an outside party. They then sold it again in a bulk website auction around 3 months ago to another outside party. It was then sold again at yet another website auction in the last few weeks where I was able to purchase the site.
To be transparent, I am not a streamer, competitive player, affiliated with Microsoft, or a previous user of AoEZone. I do however share a love of the Ages franchise (even though I am not that great, hence my username) and have a desire to make this site a great place for everyone to enjoy.
The transfer of the site and its assets has been occurring during the past week and as I'm sure a lot of you have noticed, it has been a bit bumpy. When the site was being transferred to a new server, the database that was imported to the new server was a few days out of date so there was a loss of posts during that timeframe. For those of you concerned that your posts were deleted or moderated, that was not the case, for better or worse they were just lost during the server transfer.
As of the last couple of days, we have begun making a few updates, mainly removing all of the ads! There were so many ads in lots of different places that while removing them there were times when the layout of the site was a little off and there still may be some lingering layout issues from that (specifically the right sidebar and time widget, we're working on fixing it!). We may add a few ads back in at a later date to help pay for the site, but we want to fix some other technical issues first.
We also know the site is slow and the server that it is on is not enough to handle the site's traffic which is why there are intermittent outages. We at least now have a monitoring system in place to notify us when the site goes down so we can reboot the server. The underlying forum software is also out of date and missing a lot of patches. So we will be upgrading the site's server to a dedicated provider specific for this forum software which will not only make the site much faster, but also come with some new features!
Please be patient in the coming weeks as we continue to make updates to the site to fix some underlying technical issues. Our main focus right now is getting the site onto an upgraded server with the latest version of the forum software. We will post again when we have this migration scheduled as it may be a bit bumpy again during that transition, but once it is complete, we should be good to go for the foreseeable future.
If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions to make this site better, feel free to respond in the thread or send a DM.
I wanted to share a little of the backstory regarding what has occurred regarding the site ownership. As everyone knows, _PkZ_ ran this site for many years. Around November of last year, it was sold to an outside party. They then sold it again in a bulk website auction around 3 months ago to another outside party. It was then sold again at yet another website auction in the last few weeks where I was able to purchase the site.
To be transparent, I am not a streamer, competitive player, affiliated with Microsoft, or a previous user of AoEZone. I do however share a love of the Ages franchise (even though I am not that great, hence my username) and have a desire to make this site a great place for everyone to enjoy.
The transfer of the site and its assets has been occurring during the past week and as I'm sure a lot of you have noticed, it has been a bit bumpy. When the site was being transferred to a new server, the database that was imported to the new server was a few days out of date so there was a loss of posts during that timeframe. For those of you concerned that your posts were deleted or moderated, that was not the case, for better or worse they were just lost during the server transfer.
As of the last couple of days, we have begun making a few updates, mainly removing all of the ads! There were so many ads in lots of different places that while removing them there were times when the layout of the site was a little off and there still may be some lingering layout issues from that (specifically the right sidebar and time widget, we're working on fixing it!). We may add a few ads back in at a later date to help pay for the site, but we want to fix some other technical issues first.
We also know the site is slow and the server that it is on is not enough to handle the site's traffic which is why there are intermittent outages. We at least now have a monitoring system in place to notify us when the site goes down so we can reboot the server. The underlying forum software is also out of date and missing a lot of patches. So we will be upgrading the site's server to a dedicated provider specific for this forum software which will not only make the site much faster, but also come with some new features!
Please be patient in the coming weeks as we continue to make updates to the site to fix some underlying technical issues. Our main focus right now is getting the site onto an upgraded server with the latest version of the forum software. We will post again when we have this migration scheduled as it may be a bit bumpy again during that transition, but once it is complete, we should be good to go for the foreseeable future.
If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions to make this site better, feel free to respond in the thread or send a DM.