Feldon 
Six weeks ago, GuildPortal, the community site for guilds of over 100 supported games, went offline due to a domain registration issue. This followed a multi-day outage this summer that remains unexplained. However these outages were eventually remedied and we assumed the site would resume operations for the foreseeable future. Yet last night, a terse notice was added to the top of GuildPortal:
NOTICE: GuildPortal will be going offline (permanently) by the end of the month.
We can only speculate on the reasons for the site’s imminent closure. After 14 years, maintaining the site may no longer bring any enjoyment to owner Aaron Lewis. The site’s revenue through premium subscriptions ($90/yr per guild) may no longer justify continued development. The site removed advertisements for free guilds in 2005 so only premium guilds support the site.
What’s puzzling is the near radio silence about the outages this summer and again in September, and the fact that Mr. Lewis doesn’t seem to be seeking a buyer for the site. Tens of thousands of guilds are hosted on Guild portal type sites. As a self-confessed packrat, the idea of losing all that information is horrifying. I’m not familiar with the Ventrilo voice chat hosting also provided by GuildPortal but perhaps this is what has proven too technically difficult to keep going. Again we can only speculate as nobody from GuildPortal is talking about what’s led them to the cliff’s edge.
Where Do We Go From Here?
- GamerLaunch (nee GuildLaunch) is currently working on improving their EQ2 Census support so that Guilds and Characters are automatically loaded and updated.
- Shivtr is another popular guild hosting site, however it has no Census support and thus you’ll have to add Characters to your Roster manually.
Hate to see it go offline
Not surprising though. If a site can’t even keep their domain registered despite, what I am sure were multiple emails to the admin that it would, you can tell the site is being neglected.
To be honest he got in over his head. He was depending on his programmers and IT contractors that he hired to do the job. 3 years ago when the servers he was using from a well known place in Atlanta they were down for over one month. It became clear to me he had outsourced everything. Having no control over your product is a huge liability. Not to mention he let all the free sites stay without paying, and had done away with adds. Only the really hardcore folks were paying, thus less money coming in.
Affected guilds can also move their raidplanner to http://www.allgenda.com . It also has an embedded DKP system.
A part of me is happy to see this although I now have to move all the guild posts etc over to a new site. I had sent in multiple requests for tiny fixes to be done and never even got a response. The site has been neglected with no maintenence for years now.