After nearly 20 years in operation, in various forms, the Seriously! website as everyone knows it is closing its doors. The simple answer is that it is no longer worth the money required to keep it in operation. It costs nearly $400 a year to keep it running at a speed comfortable to the traffic load. This is mostly because of the forum software, which is really old, heavy, and cpu intensive. It's also because of the file downloads because we have to host them ourselves now as opposed to being able to offload that to multiple mirrors in the past.
Now in the past the site used to have ad revenue and donations to cover hosting costs. We also got a little bit of money from merchandise but that hasn't been profitable in years. This last year we raised about half of the money in donations just to give it one more shot, but the activity level on the forums has been too low to make it worth renewing the hosting.
Nothing has been lost. It's all archived. And as you can see there is a coming soon page up, but that is on a new host provided by a generous member of our community. So what does this mean going forward? Well Seriously! isn't dead by a long shot. Things are simply going to shift in a big way.
The main activity and focus of Seriously! is now on our Discord server: https://discord.gg/FbsryWu. We have a thriving group there and a very active modding community. If you have never tried Discord before it is like a very fancy, modernized IRC chat with voice chat, video chat, and game integrations built in. If you want to be a part of our growing community then join this server. We play games together, chat, and even listen to music together on a regular basis.
We will still be posting the important franchise news through our Steam group and on Facebook. And the website will be returning as a much simpler site. We are hoping to pull the useful information from the forums and port them to a wiki. There will be a new file download system with more content and a super-easy way to add new content. There might be an events page but we'll see. No forums. No un-used news reels. Just the basics to get you in the game and keep playing.
So the answer you've all been seeking, TL;DR, gone, will be back, Discord is your god, and Stay Serious!