Precautions in case the site's current hosting goes down without warning.

[namida]

Just in case the worst happens and the US-based domain name and/or servers suddenly become unavailable, unsafe or otherwise an issue, I have take some precautionary steps to hopefully get the site up and running again as quickly as possible in such an event.

The first is that backups are now being taken weekly instead of monthly, and an increased number of prior backups will be preserved. (I will also be looking into keeping a copy of them locally rather than only on a seperate cloud service -  note that the local backups will be as well as the cloud ones, not instead of them - but I have not put this in place yet at the time of this post.)

Secondly, I have registered the domain name https://www.lemmingsforums.nz/ (based here in New Zealand) as a backup option just in case. At present it simply redirects to .net, but if for any reason we can't continue to use the .net domain, the .nz one can be used to replace it. (In particular, if things really go to shit in the US and the site becomes unavailable around the same time - definitely check the .nz one. In the event something happens but I can't get the site up on a new server right away - and taking into account that neither Discord nor QuakeNet may necesserially be available in such a scenario either - I will likely use that URL to get an "I'm working on it" message out.)

I don't think it actually will come to any of this, but with how rapidly the situation has been deteriorating in the US (where all the hosting etc is based, despite me myself being in New Zealand), I feel it necessary to at least have some precautions in place.

For similar reasons, I would also like to remind all US-based users that public posts on the site are obviously visible on the clear web, but also, that private messages do not have any encryption (unless you and the person you're messaging are manually encrypting and decrypting your messages to each other) - if access to the server (or backups) were to be granted to government agencies, they would have no difficulty ascertaining the contents of private messages. As such, anything that may be sensitive subjects in light of recent US events may be wise to discuss elsewhere. To avoid any doubt - I am not saying you are prohibited or discouraged-by-rule from discussing such subjects in your PMs to other users, just be mindful of potential privacy / safety concerns if you or the person you are messaging is in the US.