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hexbear @hexbear.net
CARCOSA [mirror/your pronouns] @hexbear.net

we fucked up

If any users have purchased domain names they can transfer to us now, or share the account credentials for the domain host please message me so i can add the domain you have to the list of options for a domain change.

Hello users of hexbear, or shall i say chapo.chat, we fucked up, and i fucked up like three times making this post.

Yes, hexbear.net has expired. Yes, we were aware of this possibility. We have gradually lost contact with the access owner (prior admin) for the domain registration. We attempted to make a migration plan, but we were disarmed by the reappearance of the party in question in September 2024 and repeated assurances that they would a) transfer credentials and b) continue payments until they were able to do the former.

We accept full responsibility for this. We should have been more aggressive about this and continued our alternative despite these reassurances. This is our fuck up, and we can't offer anything besides our continued apologies and our plan of action going forward and an explanation of what happened:

Over the time of chapo.chat and hexbear.net the admins that purchased the domain, established the donation accounts, and the server accounts have left. One of the primary admins has gone inactive and returned many times, over a year ago some of the newer admins began asking the older admins to give full access to the domain, servers, and donations. These requests were not met, despite warnings of this exact event.

At the moment we do not have access to hexbear.net and there is a strong chance we will not get it back without participating in the auction, which is already over $300. Choosing to abandon the hexbear.net domain will cause federation problems and considerable technical issues which would lead to potential extended downtime.

During this downtime we would be reestablishing access to the new domain (or hexbear.net if we win the auction), access to server ownership, and donation accounts. This would be distributed among a number of admins so that we can prevent this from happening again.

Chapo.chat has the same access problem that led to the current state of hexbear.net so it is to be considered temporary.

I will do my best to answer questions

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  • Please don't spend a single cent recovering the domain. The closing bid is probably going to be >$1000, which most of you probably couldn't afford anyways. What's done is done.

    The way forward is to accept the lost of the domain name, come up with internal processes to make sure that retiring admins have to fork over the credentials, and either come up with another site name or reuse chapochat. Please don't try to attempt to outbid these libs and definitely do not make some humiliating backroom deal with those libs over the administration of this site for the sake of getting the domain back.

    • ... What about maliciously driving the price up for whichever mfer lib trying to grab it

    • chapo.chat has the same lack of access problem that hexbear.net has so i do not want to rely on it

    • I wanted to reply to other aspects of your comment

      With regard to how we will prevent this from occurring again. We will set up a KeePass to distribute domain, donation, and server access among admins

      With regard to how this happened. The person who owns the domain and previous admin is a person I consider a friend who is going through a very difficult time.

      There were multiple outside factors that prevented them from being consistently available and due to the years of volunteering on this together I trusted that they would follow through on promises to me and other admins that they would get us the appropriate access to ensure that we did not lose the domain.

      We have been trying for over a year with multiple instances of them returning and assisting in other ways with promises to be available for transferring domain access.

      At the end of 2024 we were preparing to start the process of informing the users and beginning to change domain-names with the last contact being an ultimatum "give us access, or we are changing everything". However, the domain auction happened before we could follow through on the ultimatum. Despite what other changes were occurring site-wide the last half of 2024 I can assure you that more than one admin made multiple attempts to get this access transferred through multiple communication channels. Our mistake was trusting that despite many irl challenges this person could get the access to the other admins, which is obvious in hindsight.

      The domain has historically been on auto-payments for renewal as said by the person who owned the domain, and we had no prior issues on this matter, but we should have been aware that January was in a grace period for domain non-payment and for that we do apologize.

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