Apologies for the blackout!

Good afternoon, everyone. I’d like to explain why the kinship site was unavailable to all members from about the middle of July for over a month, and why no explanation was forthcoming even after it came back online on August 8th.

Basically, the entire site was taken down for non-payment of dues by MyBB in early July; this was largely my fault for having been offline and travelling for almost three weeks, which means I only saw the warning message literally 24 hours too late to do anything about it.

Thankfully, it turned out that Crucio had kept a complete copy of the site on his hard disk, even though, as he wrote to me, he no longer logs onto the game. We also discovered that Ingaras still owned the Northern Alliance name, so it was possible to open a new account under the old name. This has been due very largely thanks to the sterling efforts of Grimdoin, who has continued to be my go-to person every time I am baffled by the intricacies of forum mechanics.

As it happened, even after the site became operational again, I was unable to post an explanation because every time I tried, the forum page went ‘all funny’ (as we scientists call it). If anyone has been having the same trouble, the answer is “deselect the ‘Show the MyCode formatting options on the posting pages’ under Your profile/ Edit Options in the User Control Panel” (thank you, Grim).