It’s finally over.

After all the delays and all the rubbish around this entire ordeal… The tangled mess that became File Front has ended.

…

…

With the original founders buying it from Ziff Davis to keep it open.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement.

1) The March 24th announcement about FileFront suspending its operation was NOT an early April Fool’s joke.

2) This announcement about the original founders buying back FileFront from Ziff Davis Media is also NOT an April Fool’s joke.

3) We’re making this announcement on April 1st because the deal was completed today and we want to bring all services back online immediately.

4) We would NEVER suspend FileFront as an April Fool’s joke.

5) We are happy to be back!

You can read the full announcement here.

To make one point perfectly clear from our perspective… BWL will not be moving back unless something happens with our new host.  I’ve already paid more then $50 in fees to our host for premium service and another more then $50 to my bank in releated fees.

I can’t get nearly that much back.  And I’m going to be skipping a meal or two over the next two weeks until my next paycheck arrives.

This business with FileFront was very poorly managed from the outset.  We as hosted sites had zero warning that the site would close and take us with it.  We also had zero warning that a deal was in the works that might save the old site.

I’m happy to have our new host and be able to expand our functions a little.  Fictions for other games are now more then welcome here and we will be adding at least a handful of additional forums in the gaming section for other popular games our members play.

We have long since passed the point of no return here… and I think we will be better off for it.

Be sure to post suggestions in this thread.  And also indicate if you would be interested in tracking/writing news for one of these games/subjects.  We will choose five by the end of April.  Also, let me know if you have some “feature” that you would like to write about regularly.

We’re looking to take this site a little further then it has ever gone before.  Even so, FileFront continues to offer the best free file hosting option we have.  Therefore, I will continue to use their file services for our downloads.

Well… It’s April 1st… April Fool’s Day.

EVENING UPDATE:

Okay, I’ll admit… when I said I don’t care… I lied.  I do care.  Not because I care what happens to the site or plan to somehow redeem the old BWL, but I care out of shear morbid curiosity.

When I posted this morning, I was a tired and a little irritated.  And I made a number of typos.

Anyway, I feel  like editing the post with a little more effort.

So…

As of this moment, FileFront is still on-line.  In fact, the forums are back up and running.  Many comments on the countless news posts about the FileFront closing are calling shenanigans.  Even on their own forums, there are several new topics asking if the “joke” was funny or if it was all a joke.

As I said a few days ago when we first started worrying about this, a bad April Fool’s joke was a possibility.  But I still don’t believe this to be the case.  I have a hard time believing that FileFront would allow a hoax to go this far.  I mean seriously, there are news articles on actual gaming magazine websites about this.

A joke is a joke.  On April Fool’s Day, everyone expects some form of cheap gag.  For Battlefiled Hero’s, the site became Battlefield Dork.  For Freeman’s Mind, it was the death of Freeman.  On thatguywiththeglasses.com “That Guy” swapped all of his characters for his movie reviews and such.  These jokes are meant to be amusing.

What happened on FileFront is hardly a joke.  If it were an ill-advised April Fool’s Prank, then it would qualify more as a hoax.  The problem with hoaxes would be that they may not be funny and often are hurtful.

I just can’t see FileFront affecting all of its hosted sites, all of it’s sub-sites, all of it’s sub-site’s hosted sites, and the forums and files.  That would be reckless and detrimental.  Not helpful.

Moreover, they HAVE been offering free hosting, free file hosting, etc.  They make any money off advertising.  Shutting down would be more then possible due to cost issues alone… which IS their explanation after all.

Still… it could be an out of control prank.  And at this point, I don’t care.  If it was a hoax, I won’t be going back.  I’ve spent money on our new website.  As have a number of other folks.

According to the forum announcement thread…

I assure you all that the forums being online at this time is not a joke or something that is temporary. What information I have is that there will be more information to be expected sometime tomorrow. I myself am not entirely sure what is going on and why the forums are back online. I’ll know when you know really. I was just instructed to let you know that this is for real and not a joke by any stretch of the imagination. I know many will not believe me because of the terrible timing, but the persons that I had talked to about this would never joke with me about this sort of thing.

More to come as I find it out.

Jeff

There is another possibility.  Someone could have bought FileFront.  There had been some rumors that UGO might be interested… given that they bought the rest of 1up last year.

Or the parent company, Ziff Davis, might have decided to leave the servers on-line for a month or so to allow its hosted sites to move… as opposed to the week they gave us last week.

In the end, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the news is later.  But then again, that is the real problem.  Zero communication.

No one has given us any real information.  They haven’t explained why the site is still on-line.  They haven’t said April Fool’s.  No other company has announced that they have bought the site.  Nothing.

So… I’m curious.   What is happening?

What do you think?  Was it an elaborate and poorly considered April fool’s day hoax that they are now affraid to end for fear of riot?  Has someone rescued filefront from the brink of oblivion?  Did it receive a last minute reprieve from the upper management types?  A stay of execution?  Did Barak Obama personally fly to California to rescue the company with a federal bailout?  Do you even care?

Should any of us?

We stand on the verge of a new era for BWL Development.  And I wish to welcome all refugees from the FileFront hosted site apocalypse.

Indeed… welcome to bwldevelopment.com

Now, our transition to the new host was a hasty one since we had only a few days notice.  That being the case, I had to foot the full set-up bill here on our new paid host service provided by justhost.com.  Normally, that set-up would have been free… but I had no time to come up with more then a month-by-month payment plan.

I certainly seek your help in covering our expenses with the new site.  My PayPal link in the left column is here to help accept donations for the cost of server expenses.

Moving on… in the coming days we will be voting on our site direction.  You see, I have always expected hl2files to eventually close… though I did expect more warning.  Moving to a paid service provider was always the plan.

And since we are no longer a hosted site for an HL2 website, we don’t need to only focus on HL2 and its derivative games.

So…

I a want to recruit volunteers to cover news and events for other games.  Obviously, members should always feel welcome to post gaming news on the forum.  But I am going to start looking for writers for this blog.

Tonight, I am posting a poll concerning other games/companies we could cover in addition to Valve/ Source Engine Games.  Choose your 5 favorites.  At the end of 1 month’s time, we will decide which are the most popular five other games/developers to cover.

At that time, volunteers can come forward and we can also recruit from sites like Unconcerned.  We will need five “news/op ed” writers for these games… one each.  Their task will be to write articles for the blog when developers make news.  The writers will also be responsible for coming up with any features for the same games such as Op Ed pieces, reviews, suggestions for a new game, tips, or whatever they feel like.

Tonight, I will be recreating the site tree with new pages, but the changes will be relatively minor.  I mainly want to make the point clear that fictions and comics for other non-source games, or not even game related at all, are welcome.

Finally, once again I say welcome.  Welcome to the new website.

UPDATE:

It seems the little WP Widget for my poll isn’t going to work on the new server.  It hangs every time I try to submit.  That being the case, I’ve posted a topic in the forums.  Go there to suggest your favorites…

UPDATE:

It’s official…

I’m sorry to give you the bad news guys, but due to lack of funding, filefront and all network sites will shut down this month (march, 30). Since you are hosted on xx.hl2files.com still, back up your files right away! I’m terrible sorry guys, but even I have been restriced of access on hl2files and I am also fired. This is all suddenly. Got any questions? Email me back.

Regards,
Skyrider

I’m working on setting up a new host now.  Please click the PayPal link in the right column and donate to help with the cost.  I’ll be paying some set up fees and don’t really have the money to spare.

Even something as small as $1 would help.

__________________________________

I haven’t payed as much attention to my filefront account lately as I used to…

Tonight I realized that I forgot to set up my catch-all email in my mail client, so I prepared the needed data and… found a bunch of emails that still went to my old friendlygarg.hl2files.com address.

Among them were notices that my Disorientation 2-part video was being deleted for inactivity and that the other disorientation ziped file was also being deleted for inactivity.

I then decided to check my account and make sure that those were the only files I had lost… then I noticed a link at the top of the page.

http://farewell.filefront.com/

Filefront is shutting down.

Oh dear.

At first, I thought about March 30th being 2 days before April Fools Day… but this could just as easily be legitimate and according to some site’s I have visited… it is legitimate.

If that is the case, this could be bad news for us.

Obviously, all my downloads are hosted on FileFront.   But also… and more importantly… HL2Files is a file-front network site.  That’s right, our host might also be a part of the shut down.  Which means we may need to find a new host.

This is bad timeing as I am low on funds at the moment and would rather pay for a host then go on skipping around the web as we have so often in the past.  Cat-Life, Garg Arena, our stories and comics, forums, and even our SF Studios hosted site will be in danger.

There is a rumor that UGO may be interested in purchasing filefront… but who knows.

Stay tuned… I will be looking at hosting options and am making backups now.  Just in case.

On a side note… one point I have noticed that still makes this suspicious to me is the lack of emails.  I have received no emails regarding a shut down of the file hosting nor a webmaster email warning of a site shut down.  That seems a little odd… but the host could just be careless.

[EDIT]
As far as preparations go, I’ll try to make the transition to a new host as easy as possible.  I’ll be making use of our steam group [ http://steamcommunity.com/groups/BWL ] and our ModDB Profiles…

http://www.moddb.com/groups/bwl-development

http://www.moddb.com/mods/cat-life

http://www.moddb.com/mods/gargarena

http://www.moddb.com/groups/special-forces-source