Hello users of hexbear, or shall i say chapo.chat, we fucked up, and i fucked up like three times making this post.
Yes, hexbear.net has expired. Yes, we were aware of this possibility. We have gradually lost contact with the access owner (prior admin) for the domain registration. We attempted to make a migration plan, but we were disarmed by the reappearance of the party in question in September 2024 and repeated assurances that they would a) transfer credentials and b) continue payments until they were able to do the former.
We accept full responsibility for this. We should have been more aggressive about this and continued our alternative despite these reassurances. This is our fuck up, and we can't offer anything besides our continued apologies and our plan of action going forward and an explanation of what happened:
Over the time of chapo.chat and hexbear.net the admins that purchased the domain, established the donation accounts, and the server accounts have left. One of the primary admins has gone inactive and returned many times, over a year ago some of the newer admins began asking the older admins to give full access to the domain, servers, and donations. These requests were not met, despite warnings of this exact event.
At the moment we do not have access to hexbear.net and there is a strong chance we will not get it back without participating in the auction, which is already over $300. Choosing to abandon the hexbear.net domain will cause federation problems and considerable technical issues which would lead to potential extended downtime.
During this downtime we would be reestablishing access to the new domain (or hexbear.net if we win the auction), access to server ownership, and donation accounts. This would be distributed among a number of admins so that we can prevent this from happening again.
Chapo.chat has the same access problem that led to the current state of hexbear.net so it is to be considered temporary.
I will do my best to answer questions
Seems like the auction can't be stopped
Mao 2 will include registrars among the landlords.
They kept it working during the grace period or the grace period was absurdly short? I'm not sure which is worse.
The admin team had a month to pay the bill
Clearly they do the minimum effort to notify anyone when a domain expires and then pump up the auction.
They notify the domain owner. Not really their job to know about the website that the domain points to. It's not a normal situation for the domain owner to not be involved with the associated website.
It's fairly normal for expiry warning emails to get lost. Even more on the first renewal. They know this happens, that's why they keep it working right until the point where they can charge you thousands of dollars to keep your business running. The normal thing used to be that the domain goes to a parking page during the grace period so it's unmissable, not to keep it up and then immediately auction it.
yeah i dont know why we have people here defending the registrars. The first thing these fuckers do is park a domain that expires because they know someone wants it.