Kind of too soon to tell for now. If you're reading this then you already found we're using the .com for the site's domain. The .org domain has been renewed for many years by a dear old friend who lost control over it with whatever registrar. They'd let him pay for the renewal but would not let him transfer ownership to me. I've been holding onto the .com ever since another party let it lapse over a decade ago. It's not as in the spirit of things, but it'll work.

oh dear, i'm so sorry :( i just wanted to let you know that the captcha for registering new accounts is currently broken (i guess it's linked to the .org domain?)--a friend wanted to enter on the charity festival battle but couldn't

gonna repost some reported issues associated with this event

1. alerts from before the domain change link to .org

2. editing a Lyceum article results in a 500 Internal Server Error when you try to save your work
thank you, Puke!

3. this article is full of .org links:
https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/Hall+of+Golden+Winners
Viraxor edited these to .com links; thank you for your effort, Viraxor! also TIL you can use relative URLs for pages on the site in firki markup. i have edited the article once more to simply use relative URLs.

4. the captcha for registering new accounts is currently broken
thank you, Puke!

5. [Jangler's] site search is not working
thank you, Jangler!

6. the duckduckgo !botb bang

(search prefix) is broken

7. Recent Battles sidebar sometimes renders with .org images and .org links

8. the Bandcamp

links to .org

thanks slash, dami, kleeder, azurglade, lasertooth, and docnogloff for the first several reports. i will edit this comment as i find more and i'll also try to direct people here.

----

also, kleeder is aware of breakage with her external tools:
1. https://kleeder.de/files/calendar.php
2. https://kleeder.de/tools/BotBScores/56/

for the curious, she plans to fix them only after we're sure of the new future domain name

For new registration.
It seems to be broken CAPTCHA. New users have been a lot of experience problems

captcha should be fixed now but i haven't tested it

ok, who do i have to k*** to reclaim our glorious domaine?

the hall of golden winners article has been fixed

Pack it in, n00bs, we're a commercial site now. We gotta be all advertiser friendly and make dividends for shareholders (whatever those are).

the links on the "recent battles" sidebar on the main page still leads to the .org

alright, folks, the recovery fee is $1700

it's a scandalous price but i honestly expected much worse

maybe i should run a gofundme?

...oh and we'd be able to transfer the domain ownership too so this wouldn't happen again

Clicking anything from my alerts redirects me to the .org website :))

Same.

AGH! I'll chuck a few bucks your way for the domain back if you post a gofundme my life has been destabilised beyond recognition since the domain changed by three letters.

buyingin it back would give terrible incentive as well as a unearned reward to genuine moflips

yeah .. imo $1700 is just an obscene price and the idea of feeding scalpers does rankle me a bit

however if there was a gofundme i would still contribute a bit, i understand there is almost two decades of history under the domain and it carries a certain importance in that way

also - re: the alerts, new ones since the .com transition should say .com

Woah, I'm late to everything as usual but I just wanted to say how thankful I am that there is at least a back up here. Last I checked alerts also directed me to the .org page as well but it looks like things are being worked on as best as they can.

Really sad that the .org has such a ridiculous price attached to it to get it back. In the meantime just do the best you can everyone and let's be patient. I'm so glad this place isn't gone for good. You guys have no idea. Thank god I actually decided to join discord a while back or I'd have had no idea lol.

Any update on gofundme?

we're still waiting to find out if the friend mentioned in the original post would be able to transfer the domain to puke to ensure this doesn't happen in the future

Dam, I was going to jump at this and start archiving stuff when I saw that the .org had died. I had quickly looked at the discord till I found the .com. If you all want I can put some money your way, but I will really put money if that awesome torrent tracker for botb was back online. Wink wink?

Mind if we turn this sad occurrence into an opportunity to learn about history?

Does anyone know who the friend was, and why the friend had the dot-org domain in the first place? 🤔 Did puke7 love the friend? 🥺 Did puke7 write a song about the friend? 😭

Did puke7 title the song about the friend “Your Domain (You Probably Think This Song Is About You)”??? 😠😡😠😡

fundraise time!!! ^_^

i would pitch in!

p.s. alerts for comments etc. link to the old domain.

You fixed every single one I know of alert-wise except for being gifted boons from a user.

@virtualman:
https://battleofthebits.com/barracks/Profile/aclone/

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/239107754575265803/644955040318095362/battlebits.png

https://soundcloud.com/wvi/botcast-1-puke7-mootbooxle

What happens if you bid the $69 starting bid for the domain instead of the $1700?

Update! Alerts work fine for me now. Nice work guys. :)

The only alert that still redirects to the .org website (through the user webpage) is...
User gave you _b20 and they said "test donation"

From what I'm hearing on the Discord server, apparently it's only older donation messages prior to the .org->.com switchover.

UPDATE: That has been successfully fixed!

seems like battol images are broken on anywhere that isnt the home page

It's not consistent. In my case, it sometimes happens, and it sometimes doesn't. But contextually, it is in the Recent Battles section.

i might not be looking in the right place but it seems like someone else can bid on the domain and its value is estimated to be around $100 with a minimum bid of $69 (nice)

i wonder if someone did that, if they could then transfer the domain ownership to puke

my main concern there is the registrar would bid against to artificially raise the price until it reaches what they actually think its worth

but i guess if it actually stays at $100 that would be super

still haven't heard back from the registrar about the ability to transfer ownership after their extortion fee

huh, i noticed there were a couple new lyceum edits so i tried to edit Furnace Tracker article and it worked just fine

thinking the 500 issue might've fixed itself somehow, i tried once again to fix XHB series article's links and still got the 500 internal server error, so i guess not all articles are broken for editing after all? and it isn't tied to account like i thought before (since viraxor was able to edit Hall of Golden Winners, and i just tried that too successfully)

@puke7 Well, do they want to get paid or not? They would just scam-bid their way out of a sale.

i paid for a tool to bulk edit the youtube video descriptions and they should all now point to the .com entry pages

It looks like recent battles links and images still refer to .org, but only from the home page. Does not seem to be the case elsewhere.

seems like its working for me? huh
https://battleofthebits.com/

yeah this is really weird
i texted aclone to find out if he did anything
makes no sense if its working without the registrar getting paid

until i get confirmation on what happened y'all might want to be wary on using the .org domain as there might be someone playing an inbetweener and trying to steal login credentials

alright i talked to aclone on the phone and got some more details

2015 was the last time the domain lapsed and at that time the registrar was happy to comply with the update; aclone paid for 10 years of domain ownership plus domain locking protection.

Fast forward 8 years and something went awry. The sales person argued that the 10 years expired and there was never domain locking. They asked for $6k and then stepped back to $1700 for us to buy the domain back. From there aclone started sending regular threatening emails using ChatGPT legalese.

Without any contact from the registrar the .org domain is back in service.

There is a good chance that we won a fight here; that no message was received from them about it because the contact info can't be updated due to a lost identity issue (but they'll allow payment for renewal when it's time). There may have been some rogue salesman trying to pull a fast one to make up for missed car payments. I personally wonder if the registrar might be scraping all activity too though.

To top it off, navigating this situation, moving between domains and communicating the issue, has lost me a lot of time and energy that could be focused on feature work. :shrug:

I don't know exactly how important remaining a .org really is. And I'm not 100% sure that using that domain is safe for everyone or how often something like this might happen again. I might start redirecting .org to .com just to be on the safe side.

while the amount of time lost to this sales fuckery is definitely unfortunate i did enjoy the variety of jokes that came out of it with the "haha its COMmercial now!! COM not ORG!! Why is there ads now .", i don't know about anyone else tho

re: keeping the org

i mean on the surface there's no real reason to have both, but i think personally, .org is a lot more iconic to the site than .com was just cause that's what it's always been. of course, having both is good in case one of them fails for whichever reason.

if running both is going to be too expensive, i'm willing to donate to help keep them running (i'm already a patron but this site is invaluable to me so i wanna keep it going, willing to up my pledge for that if that'll be the case).

however: if you don't want the hassle of running the .org given this event, then i think just switching to .com (since you own that domain) is fine by my books as the actual important part (the site and its community) are still there

So the .org situation appears to have been a failed ORGanized scam out of the domain?

battleofthebits.net is going for very cheap...

roz buys battleofthebits.net as a battle of the bits fan newsletter

you already went through the hassle of transferring a ton of stuff to .com (like the youtube vids for example), might as well just have the .org redirect here to .com for as long as we have it

.org is back

it wld be rly cool if firki links towards both .com and .org wld behave as non-external links!
rn .org-links break some nice table layouting in lyceum articles etc, and if you want to redirect .org-links to .com anyway, it wld be a smooth thing

If the concern is whether the registrar would do more shady business, then is switching to a different registrar an option?

iirc, yes; it's a bit complicated, but it's possible.

the problem here is that the org domain isn't under pukes name, its aclone's (who, if i'm assuming correctly, is kind of the cocreator of this site? unsure but they've been here for a LONG time)

i'm fairly sure that you can transfer a domain to someone else, but the other issues is that as puke said, aclone's dealing with a lost identity issue since i'm assuming whatever they used to re-register in 2015 isn't valid anymore and doesn't match these previous details, which the registrar is maybe upset about.

tl;dr: yes but it's a complicated process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAgnJDJN4VA&list=OLAK5uy_l83XNDdw6yoNRNhqxzLgFthzDohguKu_A&index=6

chipchamp you know this is the only acceptable ac/dc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwJ6OVSwkM

yeah what Mel said except the lost identity issue even existed in 2015 with that lest renewal -- they allowed the extension but won't allow domain transfer until he can prove he lived at a certain address back in 2005 which is when the site started

aclone hung out while i swore at the cornputer screen because i had no idea what i was doing starting this place -- he also burned a lot of cd-r's that we had at some really early in-person events

and it's gone again

hi, everything in the spending boons section in https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/boons links to the old domain

updated it and lost pedagogist points 💀

there's bound to be dozens of articles that point to .orgs since the only thing you can easily soft link to (or whatever it's called i forgot) is other lyceum articles

wld like to remind ppl that you can do the redirect on your end via an addon, more informations on this thread https://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/35195/BotB+.org+to+.com+redirect+via+Redirector+addon/

https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/Ann%20Arbor%20(Major%20Battle%20Series) needs to be fixed as well

I don't think it makes sense to post every lyceum article with .org links in here now, since we are aware that there are plenty of them.
I believe there are quicker and easier ways to update all of them instead of doing it one by one

new .org looks sexy

4 easy steps to win
> register > deposit > play > win

i will do this, i will be lvl33 in no time

this is honestly a funnier outcome than i expected. RIP

i for one welcome our new corporate overlords

IDK if anybody uses Tampermonky... but here's a quick hack that *should* fix up any legacy URLs on here automagically:

https://gist.github.com/abraxas86/f81be86742ac4b8d0562638e338de96e

i've updated the database changing all botb.org's to botb.com's in the follow spaces:

lyceum edits
thread posts
thread titles
entry descriptions
botbr profiles/bios
battle descriptions

let me know if anyone finds any breakages or more places to do the search and replace thing

PUKE7++

did u update homepage links too?
edit: seems to be the case, nvm then

as far as duckduckgo (and thus, probably every non-google search engine since they are based on bing) knows, this site (as in, the .com, not the .org) literally does not exist, even when the url is searched directly.

not good. hopefully it fixes itself soon but since we're t+25d or thereabouts since takeover i fear a more drastic approach will be required.

ive updated all links i have on my stuff to botb to be of the .com variety rather than the .org so im hoping that helps just a little