AR15.com de-platformed and implications for this site.

[running-man]

Per this article, https://t.co/vCnLtxWYjK?amp=1 it appears that "Arfcom" has been de-platformed by their registrar GoDaddy.  In my opinion the writing is on the wall; things will get much worse for the gun community before they get any better.  We may never return to how the 'net was pre-2021.

SKS-Files is not hosted or registered by GoDaddy (so we have that going for us in the short term), but in the grand scheme of things if momentum builds and there is a concerted (or even colluded) effort by multiple corporations to eliminate all gun forums, sites, and stores off the internet, there is nothing much that individuals can really do at that point.  I don't post this to frighten or enflame, but it's probably best to at least keep track of which corporations are wielding this hammer (and more importantly learn how they make their money off you).   A larger step would be to do a bit of preemptive letter writing to your various elected officials alerting them of this behavior (local, state, and national) but in all honesty, I suspect at least at the national level this will do very little.

[Greatguns]

I wonder where the right of private business vs breach of 1st amendment rights and censorship come into play here. This is the same thing with the big hi-tech companies censoring Trump and others.

Basically conservatives need our own web/internet/server platform with which to communicate and make known the other side of the story.

[lowell66dart]

Google Musk and censorship. Seems one of the richest men in the world still believes in individual rights.

[Larry D.]

Almost as if the leftist were waiting for the signal to cut it off.....

[Cz315]

Arfcom is back, they had backups and given the resources there it ended up to be a minor glitch and they successfully moved servers.

However, it is indeed a symptom of a much bigger and very worrisome issue.

[Justin Hell]

It might not hurt to come up with alternative hosting, and have a backup set up that is synced daily.
Could be handy for experimenting with new stuff too.
Is there enough space on the Weebly site to allow for at least the infrastructure portion to live there and store the 'data' in a daily updated cloud somewhere.
Webprepping.

[Greatguns]

It might not hurt to come up with alternative hosting, and have a backup set up that is synced daily.
Could be handy for experimenting with new stuff too.
Is there enough space on the Weebly site to allow for at least the infrastructure portion to live there and store the 'data' in a daily updated cloud somewhere.
Webprepping.

I don't know that I would trust Weebly to that, but a back up set up on different servers would be good. Most site hosts are set up that way anyway, but these days that doesn't mean much if the host is going to nuk the site. They would be apt to sabatoge the back up as well.

[Justin Hell]

I have run servers from my home before, LONG ago...but it really doesn't take much, aside from bandwidth issues on a media heavy site.  A daily backup could be FTPed to a backup server to keep things as current as possible...and saved should our hosts decide that the party is over.  A less dynamic site like the Weebly guide site should, and probably is already saved on the admin's machines anyway.

After being threatened by the RIAA over my KISS bootleg video tape site back in 99....I was constantly worried about having my hosting removed and data deleted, so I just kept my home server synced with my live site, so if anything happened...all I would have to do is point my DNS to my home server and it could limp along until friendlier hosting could be arranged.

It might be a good time to brush up on using TOR.

[Bacarnal]

Ok, just read this post.  Not being computer literate (I still have my chisels for stone tablet writing), all these acronyms just confuse me.  The one thing I do know is that it sounds a mite pricey.  That said, what additional funds would be needed to ensure that the accumulated knowledge of this site is safeguarded and that RM and the other administrators have the tools to maintain it?

[running-man]

The main focus of this post was that we just need to be vigilant and keep our eyes open to notice that this kind of stuff starts to happen more frequently.  There is no perfect plan B; we can think up alternatives, but if a concerted effort by multiple tech companies is made against the firearms blogging/bulletin board community as a whole, there really will be little recourse (especially for a site the size of ours).  Look at what happened to Parler: growing at 4000% one day, gone the next because Amazon Web Services yanked the rug out from under them. 

[Matchka]

Re bacarnal's post, I'm up with the acronyms and lingo, but preserving the invaluable information the Admins have accumulated over the years is critical to a recovery if/if the Files is de-platformed. If it's a matter of funds, what can we, the members, do to pitch in? Presumably, most, if not all of us are going to receive a 'stimulus' check... 

[running-man]

Re bacarnal's post, I'm up with the acronyms and lingo, but preserving the invaluable information the Admins have accumulated over the years is critical to a recovery if/if the Files is de-platformed. If it's a matter of funds, what can we, the members, do to pitch in? Presumably, most, if not all of us are going to receive a 'stimulus' check... 

Ahh, we do have backups.  They are not daily nor are they automatic, but I do try to download the entire site to a local drive on a semi-regular basis.  As far as getting back up if we have the rug pulled out from under us, if we were able to find another hosting service, we could theoretically restore a full backup, point the domain name to the new server and be back and running relatively quickly.   

[Matchka]

Good to know!
'Rug pulling' is becoming more worrisome; especially for anything related to online firearms discussion (speech) and sales (commerce). Despite 40 million new sales (owner/citizens) entering the gun community in 2020, the anti-2A megaphone will likely make the next two to four years a bumpy ride.

[Greatguns]

It all started with pulling wool over the eyes, now it has progressed to Rug pulling, wonder what's next?