this came as a big suprise to me as well, it was totally a fucked up thing to do by rob. the site was dying and we were ready to accept it, but erasing all legacy and the remnants of community is a stupid and unncecessary thing to do
so the story is, these last few years you could say that PSD was on "life support", because site code mas a total mess, we had no one to fix it, and even when we had rob's friend dev volunteer for a short while, he said it's messed up and would take tons of time to even figure out the cause of most issues, after he already sepnt many hours on it. it was only getting worse with sporadic weeks of downtime, we could only do some band-aid fixes for that: frequent server restarts, sometimes restoring weeks-old backups losing all new data, but at least it was running, and we were improving our stats quality in spite of that, we had some sort of community around it in discord. then our hosting provider started getting very shady, introducing new issues, their support would be nearly impossible to reach, last thing they did in april is took a monthly payment for a week of their services, then demand another montly payment, saying we have a grace period of 3 weeks before they shut us down, then they shut the site down after just two days (on my birthday, lol), of course their support was impossible to reach again. rob has been saying that the messed up site code would make it nearly impossible to transfer to another host, so the best we could do is rely on patreon and ad revenue to keep it on life support and get ready for the site to go down for good, this went on for about a year, but it caught up to us as you can see
i think we should've reached out for some support to other pes communities like this one, but i personally didn't know how excatly we would do that (how to put it into words), so we never did, except on out discord (it was two weeks ago, and no one noticed it). it seems foolish now as i see web devs in this here thread who could've at least consulted us on the code issues
anyway, we may have a site backup left with one of our guys who was trying to work on keeping the site semi-alive, but i'm not sure, i'll need to ask first. do any of you guys want to take a look at it later? i really hope that we can at least rescue the database and revive it in one form or another
@A.A.A @marqisspes6
i think we're should create another discord server for PSD community now, but except this thread, i don't know how else we could find our lost audience