Hello everyone...
When Garfield was the owner of SG, he sold it off to an outside party: a guy named Amit. Amit tried to maintain activity at SG, but could not. He ended up selling it to another guy named Ryan. Ryan has no activity here at SG, and does not intend to have any.
When Spartan was the president, there was a working relationship between him and Ryan. While Ryan may have owned the domain name, he gave Spartan and the Board the access they needed to do their tasks when it came to management, security, upgrades, etc etc. This access was cut from us about a few months ago. The only form of communication I have (or Spartan had) with Ryan was email. With that being said, the email conversations I have with him are incredibly frustrating. He either does not respond to my emails at all, or he will respond, but does not answer what I am asking him. We no longer have a relationship with the domain owner that enables us to do our job as members of the Board.
With that being said, I sent Ryan an email at the beginning of this week (after months of trying to regain access), essentially telling him to either sell the domain to us or we will be forced to move our community elsewhere. Ryan wants an astronomical amount for the site. After trying to get him to negotiate with us, he has stopped responding to me altogether. So, this leads us into being forced to move our community somewhere else.
As much as I would love to keep steam-gamers.net, we are no longer able to stay here. We have no way to protect this site if anything were to happen; we are relying entirely on an outside party who isn't even active here. I am not trying to make Ryan out to seem like a bad guy...I'm sure he has a busy life and all that jazz, but this third-party-owner scenario we have does not work anymore.
You are probably asking yourself "What does this mean for me?" In all reality, the only thing we are changing is the domain name, with a slight change to our publicly displayed name. Due to potential legality issues, we have to change our name slightly, in case Ryan were to come after us. The logo will stay the same; floffypus owns that and all rights associated with it. Our new name will be SteamGaymers.
Okay, not really. Seriously though, the new site will be Steam-gamers.net. Everything else will remain the same. The only other slight change will be the connection info for teamspeak (the connection info is 192.223.24.27); the IP is the same...but just in case you are using ts.steam-gamers.net to connect. All of the server IP's will remain the same. The forum layout will remain the same. All of your posts, thanks, avatars, etc, will be the same (save for posts that are made potentially in between the last backup and when we bring the new site up).
We are going to be working on this over the next day or two. While this is happening, the servers won't be down. There will be some restarts happening to update all of the info in the servers to reflect the new domain...but that is it. Please pass this word around. We are going to be sending announcements in all the steam groups, so everyone is on the same page. If the forums go down, please try using the new domain to see if the new forums are up. However, we will still be sending a message on the steam group to make sure people get the word. If you are not apart of the group, please join it.
I understand this is a big change, but in all reality, mostly everything will remain the same. We just need to move in order to provide the best support we can to you guys. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us here, in a PM, teamspeak, or steam. We are trying to make this transition as smooth as possible, and we appreciate all of your constant support in pushing the community forward.
Once again:
New Domain: www.steam-gamers.net
TeamSpeak IP address: 192.223.24.27
Steam Group: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Steamgamers