My offer was to take over payments for aaaa for a month or two or whatever was necessary, while the rest of my plan was implemented. No compensation required, consider it a gift. That plan was:
1) Migrate the forums to x-null. No slight at all intended to aaaa - they have my utmost respect and appreciation - but the site there is not very active. As such - if my fellow x-null peeps are willing - James would create/rejuvenate forums on x-null that address what aaaa was doing with them, and the users just migrate. Obviously we'd have to give some thought to preservation/migration of past thread archives. Is there any other content involved besides the mohaadatabase? Thus, the forum piece is not in my offer as x-null already has the infrastructure in place to manage and given traffic and commonality of existing users, this seems like a no-brainer to me.
2) I would take over hosting of the mohaadatabase. I'd ask/hope that Shadow would partner up with me on that, at least initially. It would have to be hosted using a stack that I am familiar with (*nix, apache, mysql). All the files could be migrated (just send me a HD if its a lot of GB, how much space are we talking)? Someone would have to create the front end, I do not do website creation. Shadow could still help maintain it if he wishes. If he does not, I'd be happy to do it alone. There would be no charge or compensation required for this. Hosting would be gratis. Before I agree to that, I need details from HSB on storage requirements. DK mentioned above that a beefy server is required, I suspect that is not the case. I doubt there are hundreds of simultaneous users putting stress on the db, and *nix instead of windows dramatically reduces hardware requirements. As few dependencies as possible, and must all be housed on one vm.
3) When I made my offer yesterday, I was not at all aware of the gameserver hosting. My initial thought was that I would not be interested in that. However, I'm already hosting 4 or 5 gameservers. If someone can give me details on the number and type of servers, maybe i can consider this. I could do it free, or for a cost to the server owner, or not at all. I'd like to be in the loop on discussion for this, in case based on the details I decide to offer it.
4) Are there any other services that aaaa was running besides the forum, mohaaaadb, and gameservers? If I'm going to agree to do things gratis I need to know the scope a little better....
Everything is a VM on our infrastructure, so while the hosting company will continue if I am ever hit by a bus, the failsafe for future is they would provide a vmexport and future migration would be a load vm and boot operation.
I will help in any way I can. I will not allow the mohaaaadb to go silent, I and others depend on it and it's critical that it be there if mohaa is to have a future (which I think it does).
Best,
Todesengel