NOTICE: NLE has been permanently shut down
It sucks that NLE was shut down and Im sure the guy who was running it had his reasons. However, I think it was done in a really shitty way. Doing it without notice over a holiday weekend? That's a move I'd expect from the current administration to pass some shady legislation. The community is small and fragile, closing the way it did was a gut punch.
I don't agree... How is it a gut punch? The site was clearly dying and losing functionality over the past year. Once NLC came to be there was just no reason to keep the old site up and running. People can say "Oh, but the tracks on there were good and now we lost them!" But those same people fail to realize that the old exchange was basically non functional, downloading tracks was pretty much impossible 90% of the time as is.
One thing that bothers me is the fact that the original owner didn't let one of the more active mods (Rwn, King, etc) take full control but instead let it break down in his hands when there were plenty of people to hand it to.
NL1 has come to an end for sure. Those files from NL1 it took weeks to create and the structures and supports I would make from wood beams like accurate B&M connectors are now all gone and the construction and progress has gone with it.
Mrcrolly posted on January 4th, 2018
One thing that bothers me is the fact that the original owner didn't let one of the more active mods (Rwn, King, etc) take full control but instead let it break down in his hands when there were plenty of people to hand it to.
Not to dig into past drama, but there were red flags raised about this in just a couple years after NLE debuted. Ed Boxer was one of the original mods at the time, and he was very frustrated with how little communication or control were delegated. He complained that so many features were lacking and that nobody could control the main site. I remember seeing some of the old rants on the Headquarters boards before he left the team. It's amazing to me that NLE lasted as long as it did with hardly anyone steering the ship.
The number of members was the only thing keeping it alive.
This was also a design goal for NLC. Having seen this happen at Coaster Sims and NLE we wanted to ensure lots of people had the ability and access to make changes and steer the ship.
-Ride_Op
On the subject of that, where is this hosted? Is it on a private server or is it being hosted by the NL Team? Running a website of what will become this size and demand this much traffic won't come cheap...
Anyone else ever dream about NLE being unexpectedly back up?
Nope. I was very tired of the forum having lots of server errors, it seems like, once a month. Plus the exchange not seeming to download coasters correctly. I would get a lot of "Not A Valid Package" because the park download would not finish all the way.
^^^ NLC is hosted by me on Digital Ocean, specifically the $80 server option, which provides more than enough resources to run the site. That is roughly what the first monthly cost of NLC was and will continue to be, I think. So it is actually pretty affordable for me to host NLC with all of its services ad free, etc.
It does use some other paid services. Amazon Web Services is used for the hosting of parks and some other things, but even those services are extremely cheap, almost free. The other services NLC uses that cost money have a free plan, and most of those plans suffice, some may need to be upgraded in the future to a paid plan, but I'll look into that when it comes.
Ride op has a way to message me so anything him or the NL development team want to discuss for the site in terms of features / management, etc, are obviously free to discuss with me. I do intend to maintain and develop it for the foreseeable future.
^^Why would we dream of that when we have this beautiful site? ;)
^Same reason people dream about random things when asleep.
I personally had many posts, random things and discoveries I wish I had saved elsewhere... It's many years of history that's gone in the blink of an eye, so that's a bit heartbreaking, but eh...
Understandable.