GuildPortal Allows Domain to Expire, Leaving Thousands of Guilds in Lurch — UPDATE: It’s Back!
Feldon 
Two years after abandoning its Twitter and Facebook accounts and four months after an as-yet-unexplained multi-day outage this summer affecting thousands of guild portals for dozens of different MMOs, it seems that GuildPortal has finally and unceremoniously gone belly up. According to DNS records, GuildPortal.com’s domain was marked expired pending deletion on September 19th and there have been no signs they intend to resurrect the site. Now tens of thousands of guilds are left in the lurch, with no access to their DKP and Attendance records, News, Forums, Roster, etc.
Unfortunately, the alternatives to GP all have various drawbacks making them non-obvious choices. Guild Launch Gamer Launch does not use the EQ2 Data API (Census), despite my personal offers to the development team to do this work for free in 2013 and again in 2014 when they contacted us about doing a Guild Launch contest. As a result, Guild Rosters and Items must all be entered and maintained manually which is just absurd given live data is available.
From the front of the site, open the Guild Roster menu and choose Characters. You must then manually Add a Character by specifying Name, Server, Race, Class, Gender, and Level. Only after you do this will a small popup menu appear named “Add Character“. The first choice under this popup is Roster Import. This is, to our knowledge, the only place on the site where you can load a Guild Roster from EQ2 Census. Once we found it, we were able to load our entire guild quickly, however the data is limited to each character’s Name, Race, Class, Level, and Guild Rank.
We have reached out to GamerLaunch, offering our time to improve this import service as well as adding the EQ2U Item Hover service to their site.
Shivtr is another hosting option although we don’t know much about it.
Dethdlr and I have discussed the possibility of offering our own guild home service on EQ2U, but this would require a tremendous amount of effort to support the feature set that sites like Gamer Launch and Guild Portal have. At the bare minimum, we’d have to provide full loot logging, DKP tracking, Attendance, Calendar, Posts, Uploaded Photos/Attachments, and Forums, all of which we’d have to build (except the Roster which we get for free from Census, and DKP which we’d modify a recent copy of eqdkp).
Tip of the hat to MP for this news.
You guys don’t get nearly enough appreciation for all the hard work you do.
Guild Launch is not bad, but it does need updating with Census data – if they would get that going, it would be a good option. It’s usable now, just not ideal.
We swapped to Gamer Launch (their new name) this summer. I still had some retrievals to do at the old site, but thankfully I managed to grab most of it.
GL is the most similar to GP I was able to find out there. Perhaps they would be amendable to talking to you again, Feldon?
WE are using guild launch. For years I had used guildportal for years. I been though many games, and many guilds and it was always the go to. In fact I had used it to keep in contact with guild mates that long since moved on to other things. However the writing was on the wall when it was down for 1 week, and they could not get it working, and had blamed the folks who they were paying big bucks to maintain the site for them. I am sad to see it go.
Enjin is what I’ve used for most my guild hosting, but I’m not sure how much support is there for EQ2, my guild had already moved onto other games when I went to them.
Feldon, you and Dethdlr already go above and beyond what is humanly possible for so many people. Your offers of doing more are just amazing. I don’t want to see you get burnt out and collapse by giving so much of yourself. Heck, DenMum is a perfect example of health going down the drain by serving the public so much and so well.
If others are so arrogant (my word) to toss your offers aside and treat their existing customers so poorly it is not up to you two amazing people to kill yourselves for their failings.
whew, /off rant
Virtual hugs,
Betony
For what you and your associates have done, thanks very much.
As far as doing more for free, I think it’s time DBG had a talk with you about being put on the payroll…
I’ve never used guild portal so I dont exactly know what I’ve been missing. We do host on (guildlaunch) Gamer Launch and went many months with out being able to pull rosters from census. We are able to now. It sounds really cool the idea of pulling items too, was that done on guildportal?
Hey everyone. Stephen from GamerLaunch here. Sorry to hear about Guild Portal. I know that’s a pain for you all. Just to clarify, we did add Census support. It took a lot longer than I would have liked, but it did get done. If we are still missing some data please let us know.
We’re also offering a 3 Month coupon if you use the coupon here:
http://www.gamerlaunch.com/info/guild-portal-down.php The coupon will add 3 months to any subscription. So you can pay for 1 month and get 4 or any other combo and at any plan level.
Anyway, that’s the marketing message. Good luck with your gaming.
Cool – thanks for the update Stephen. I’m glad you and Feldon let us know about census support as that will be a big draw!
If you had a guild portal and need some info from your site, it’s available on google cache.
Looks like Guild Portal is back online.
I don’t see it online.
*shrugs* I can use the site just fine at the moment.
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/guildportal.com.html
It could be a DNS issue for certain ISPs maybe.
Must be. I can’t get to it.
Guildportal.com domain registration has been updated less than 2 hours ago:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=guildportal.com
It shows the original owner name (Aaron Lewis) and the site is working for me.
Hmm.. I get some parked site like it’s not active. Maybe a DNS propagation thing: http://i.imgur.com/cU2XZf4.png