IPBFree Gone.

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

IPBFree Admin posted this on his blog: http://tomlough.co.uk/post/815342111/hello-goodbye

Hello, Goodbye



If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that iPBFree closed its doors suddenly earlier this week. I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already said repeatedly since it happened, but I will say this; we are really exceptionally sorry about the loss to your communities, and if we’d had any choice in the matter we certainly wouldn’t have just left you with nothing. I also want to quash rumours that this has been caused by an internal argument - the iPBFree team remain good friends and nobody on the team is responsible for this, so please don’t blame or accuse them.

I’d like to take this final opportunity to thank everyone who was involved with iPBFree over the years; staff, people who posted on our official boards, even users we never spoke with but were faithful to iPBFree nonetheless. iPBFree wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did without the support from you guys, and it’s such a shame it’s had to end like this when we had so much more left to give. I’m going to miss everyone from the community forum - our great debates, the Tombob banter, the Sesame Street stuff…

I’ve met some great people through iPBFree and had the best of times. There was never a dull moment in our staff meetings or MSN conversations, and people on the internet rarely make me laugh as much as the iPBFree guys have. As sad as I am to see the service go like this, I’ve got some great memories out of it. I hope that, with the obvious exception of recent events, we provided a good service to all our users and I’m so sorry we’ve let everyone down.

Thank you to those who have been sending myself and other staff messages of support over the past few days. While I don’t blame people for being angry and annoyed, it’s really nice to see we were appreciated. I wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavours, and hopefully I’ll be seeing some of you on my journeys around the web.

It’s been a blast.

 

[ThaBawse]

^ TL;DR



Basically, the phrase 'you never know what you have till it's gone' comes in. These guys now realize they had a deep user base and regret not dealing with the whole legal problem before.

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

Yeah only a court order could make them wipe everything from their servers without warning. Guess they were afraid of going to jail.

 

[Cranos]

A lot of rumours are saying they didn't delete the forums that were illegal and were forced to shut down because of it eventually.

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

This isnt really the 1st time Ive seen this happen. A few years back there was a host called jconserv that shut down suddenly and everything was lost.. Here is an old yahoo answers page talking about it: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071108222019AALwXjh

I can think of a few other forum hosts off the top of my head that did the same thing but I can't remember the names of them right now.



Now it appears that a free wordpress host has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of a history of abuse. It hosted over 73,000 blogs. That one was called http://blogetery.com/

 

[Flurry]

Wow.

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

Yeah read this thread about that shutdown blog host: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=964013

I bet the same exact situation applies to IPBFree.

 

[Cranos]

That really sucks for the guy and it's a pretty ridiculous reaction of the hosting company.

 

[Flurry]

That whole mess just sounds bad.