Poufwa Out Of Foreclosure!!!

Welcome back to PotterFicWeekly! This is Ryan.

First, allow me to quickly answer the most common questions I’ve heard over the past few days.

1) I have not left the fandom.

2) I did not forget to pay the bill.

3) Yes, I noticed the site was down.

4) No Mike, I didn’t ban you from Poufwa.

5) No Jen. I didn’t ban you from Poufwa.

Like many of you, I woke early on Wednesday morning to check on Poufwa before heading to work and found PFW, the Poufwa Exchange, and the Poufwa forum listed as suspended by our former webhost. We’ve had issues with our provider for months which resulted in short periods of downtime, but this time I was unable to resolve the issue and needed to immediately find a new home for Poufwa. Due to a busy work schedule and dinner plans on Wednesday, I wasn’t able to start the process until late Wednesday, and due to severe demand from our new web host, the process of transferring our files took much longer than expected.

The whole “three hour podcast” thing finally bit us in the butt!

As of this afternoon, PotterFicWeekly and the Poufwa Exchange are back online. The forum should be back shortly.

This entire experience has solidified for me 1) that we’re a community and 2) that we’re a Poufwa community. Because our staff email accounts went down with the ship, I contacted our hosts via my personal email account to ask them to start relaying information through skype and facebook.

Jen2’s response was my favorite: “Who are you?!?!”

Major kudos to Richard/LonelyRiddle, who was jostled awake last Wednesday by my repeated calls for help and who has talked me through explanations of forum coding and website transfers that I never would have understood otherwise. I have a masters degree in Business Administration. My kingdom for knowledge of mysql!

My thanks to Kismatt, Sueatducksfoot, Jen2, and LadyChi who kept the community together.

Many of you have contacted me over the past few days asking how they can send in donations to assist in maintaining Poufwa. I had never considered accepting donations before as this is my gift to this community and to myself. While the last week did cost money, it was not nearly what it could have been, and there’s zero risk that Poufwa will ever end over financial concerns. That being said, so many generous Poufwanians feel such a strong connection to this community that I will set up a paypal account so members can contribute towards the future costs of maintaining Poufwa.

That said, until the forum comes up, please use this space to keep in touch with each other!

Ryan