Hello. This is your friendly neighborhood Webmaster and site administrator, Sean "Nz17" Robinson. This is an important notification about the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable forum - which I wish to be the first of many. Please stay tuned to this channel for more information as the days and weeks pass. Copies of these posts will be mirrored at the Web pages of https://www.nz17.com/digital-press/retrogaming-roundtable/notices/ as well as https://www.digitpress.com/forum/notices/ .
The DPRR forum will be indefinitely offline for the foreseeable future. There are several backup copies of the DPRR message board's database. The most recent of these is from Sunday, March 22nd, 2026 C.E. Everything from after that day was unfortunately lost. Options are being investigated for bringing the forum back to the Internet in some form or another, whether continuing as an active online community with fresh threads and replies or at least as an archive of posts preserved on the Web somewhere, preferably mirrored across several sites. Please stand-by for more information in this regard when or if it is available. Thank you.
While Joseph "Joe" Santulli had written an e-mail to me during Thursday, April 2nd, 2026 about what was about to happen, I did not notice the message until about Friday, April 10th, 2026. This is thanks to worsening and continuing computer problems and health concerns which I have had during these past three years - and some even before then - limiting the frequency with which I have been able to read and respond to e-mail and to work including upon the Web servers and forum. Nonetheless, thanks to the sudden, abrupt discontinuation of message board hosting, all data after March 22nd was lost.
Yet, to be fair, Joe did pay thousands of dollars during the decades to continuously host the DPRR forum while it was online. Nonetheless, it seems that he didn't notice the e-mail which I sent to him sixteen months ago during December 2024 about the forum, server concerns, FTC disclosure notices being posted, hosting costs, and re-instating revenue from the eBay Partner Network (ePN). Addressing these things might have returned revenue, increasing finances and decreasing the overall cost of hosting. I presume that the e-mail message successfully arrived to his e-mail account, yet the message was erroneously sent to the spam folder and never checked nor read. Regardless, I guess this was something of a "ships passing in the night" situation overall or so it would seem.
However I, Nz17, noticed that the forum appeared to be offline during the days surrounding Sunday, April 5th, 2026. I reckoned that it was just yet one more of the usual server hiccups that have seemed to follow the DPRR Web server these past few years. However, unlike those other times, waiting for a short while would not clear the situation, the Web hosting software wouldn't respond neither, and I couldn't log to the server. Given that I had created and installed several optimizations and changes for the forum's server just days prior, I took an educated guess that it was a bug or oversight in those changes that was the cause. It was not. I still didn't know that Joe had torpedoed the server via the host. All I knew was that when I checked this time, the server would not respond to HTTP, nor SSH, nor even ping requests. It was time to urgently communicate with Joe to ask him to manually reboot the server with the forum's Web host, Digital Ocean, using Joe's own credentials.
During the next several days, I sent many e-mail and voice mail messages to Joe, not aware of his April 2nd message nor subsequent message replies that he sent to me with regards to the messages I had independently started sending to him. As a result, he was surprised by the content of my messages, unaware that I hadn't yet read his messages. Eventually though, April 10th or so arrived and during that morning, I read the e-mails which Joe had sent. I then fully realized the situation. Joe had written to me during April 2nd stating his intention of destroying the forum's server to save $42 per month. He wished for me to be the first to know. Joe then assumed that I read the missive. He didn't wait for confirmation nor affirmation. Only after I began sending my messages in reaction to the server being offline did Joe send further communiques, seemingly as surprised as I was in my own regard.
Everything was already destroyed. All that was online-only was lost.
Whilst this is not the situation which most of us wished for, it is nonetheless the current situation. The forum was intentionally taken offline starting about Sunday, April 5th, 2026 by Joe Santulli. Joe has decided that the $1.40 per day for hosting the forum at the World Wide Web was too much of a financial toll. He told the Web host, Digital Ocean, to immediately alleviate him of this financial burden by destroying the virtual server during that time this April. Joe had been wanting to take the forum permanently offline for years going back to about 2010 thanks to hosting costs and technical difficulties piling up with the DPRR. However, it was thanks to calls from dedicated fans of the forum with its wealth of valuable information, the priceless community, the wonderful people, the traditions, the silliness, and the good times past and present, that a dedicated team of which I, Nz17, was proud to be a part, kept the forum online and active all of these years with Joe's generous acquiescence and cooperation.
Now without further postponement, I would like to give a short ado before the adieu via a shout-out of proper respects and applause to some valuable people. You deserve it!
DPRR Forum, ~2002 – April 5th, 2026, R.I.P.
Thank You for Playing!
I intend to write more another time. And thank you for reading. If you wish to communicate with me - including possibly being listed as friends for further communications via Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, other social media services, or otherwise - then please write to me via https://www.nz17.com/contact.php with your words. Thanks again!