Left 4 Dead Survival Community

Future of the website

Dear survival-mode lovers,

I am pretty upset and certainly not happy to bring the following news to you: the l4d-survival.com website may well cease to exist in a few weeks.

The current Internet Service Provider has informed me that they will be shutting down some services starting April 30, 2020. The l4d-survival.com website is impacted because it is currently running on one of those services.

To give you more details, the website is running on a server that is powered by an operating system which is itself reaching its end of support this year, on November 30. The ISP has decided to pull the plug on related services much earlier.

In such cases, the solution is usually to use a newer server based on a newer operating system and it's end of story. However, here, the website uses a software package called PHP-Fusion. PHP-Fusion itself depends on another software package called PHP. And PHP-Fusion is not compatible with the newer versions of PHP that can be found on newer servers. PHPFusion cannot be upgraded, because of a lack of documentation, both from the original authors of PHP-Fusion, from their current online documentation, and from the past owners of the website. I have spent a lot of efforts and time on these incompatibilities and constraints back in 2018, to no avail.

Not all is lost though, I keep reflecting about all of this and I still have one last card to play. For the time being, I cannot even share a sentiment about whether that last card looks promising or not.

One legitimate question that may come to mind is whether it's worth it to try and keep the website running.

First, in terms of money, it costs me about 10 (ten) euros a year to own the domain name. The 3 (three) Community Servers cost 5 (five) euros a month, off of a different server that the one that runs the website. The server that runs the website runs my other websites so l4d-survival.com adds no cost there. All in all, the cost is rather insignificant.

Second, even though the traffic on the website is close to none, there was a reason why I volunteered to keep it alive. Don't ask me, I don't remember. And frankly, I don't think it's important. Yes, the traffic is low. Yes, the contents is old. Indeed, the record times are outdated since new times were not notified. But hey, not everything in life is easy. Is it? It's actually the contrary in my book. And we often need to exert ourselves for things to happen. I believe that this is one such case.

The l4d-survival.com is in jeopardy because the Internet Service Provider decided to shut down some services upon which the website depends. Standard ways of dealing with similar situations are unavailable to me despite my having spent tons of time trying to make one of those ways work. I still have one last bullet to shoot, but in case it does not work either, the website will be closed on April 30 this year.

Keep surviving!