OFC » Here for you.

MESSAGE TO MEMBERS

As Many of you have seen the OFC web site went off line for a number of days, and you now find you can't log into your account.

You will have to make a new account as the whole database has been replaced with a new one.

Below if a summary of whats been going on with the OFC site, We hope this explains a few things to you and reasons why.

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Arteryplanet, was the company we used for many years from day one when Virg first started the club. They were rock solid, and their support was great. In the last few months the company split, and some of the customers automatically migrated with Manuel who was one of the owners. Some unlucky customers (like us) on the Linux side were left with the other owners (Vic and Valerie Chisnell) who wouldn't respond AT ALL to support tickets or talk to any of the customers. Things were just left on auto pilot, and they decided not to pay their hosting bill to atjeu.com and the servers were promptly shut off, even though all the customers like us had paid our hosting costs to Arteryplanet. Multiple support tickets were put in with no reply at all from them. I spent days and weeks waiting for some resolution. Of course, AP still charged my credit card for hosting costs even though the service wasn't being provided. I am still in the process of disputing charges for that with PayPal.

Finally, I got to thinking that I should log on our account and make sure our ofc domain registration had the correct information in it, as we are going to have to take control of it because it looked as if Arteryplanet was taking everyone's money and running. After seeing the forum postings at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=982295 I knew the worst was true. It turned out that these scammer dirt bags that own AP had our domain registered in their name. I promptly put a stop to that bs and changed the details, and went to eNom who is the ACTUAL registrar that AP used for our domain and submitted my ID so we could take control of it. After a long few days, we finally had control of our domain again so we could switch hosting companies and change nameservers. I tried hosting with eNom, but their control panel sucked, so I tracked down the owner of the servers that AP didn't pay and we are now using them for a host.

We also had the added problem, that we couldn't get any of the files off the old server, as it was shut down, but it did come on now and again because they were letting customers grab files. Last week Dave and I happened to be chatting and the server came on, so we started ftp'ing files like mad. I was able to grab about 75% of all the files on there which was about 40,000 and that was enough for Dave to get things going. At this point, I had done what little I could on my end, paid for the hosting, and 2 years of domain registration from eNom, and Dave (Oscar) did what he does best, and things are back up and running again. The old database was too large, and was corrupted and wouldn't import, so we had to start with a new user DB, hence everyone has to re-register.

We can't give Dave thanks enough, because without him, we wouldn't have the nice website that we do (thanks Dave!).

OFC IowaMoe300