Welcome To The New Zkl

[Luna Manar]

(this is also posted on the news section of the homepage)


Hey everyone. This is Luna, your friendly ZKL Greeter (and occasional lurker).

One minute I'm checking my e-mail on a Tuesday morning and the next thing I know I'm an admin and my webspace is the new host for Zookeeper's Lounge, and we're all trying desperately to transfer the forum from one site to two others. I'm not certain I quite understand how I came to be in this position, but, what the heck, here I am, and here we go.

As you probably noticed, ZKL has a new home now, as well as some new admins. Some of you might be a little confused as to how this happened so fast and why; I'll try to explain. It's a bit of a story, so bear with me.

Zookeeper left a note with Searain this month, proclaiming he has quit. His reasons were personal, but understandable, and we wish him all the best. From that moment we had only a short amount of time before zklounge.com and magicspot.com shut down. A few ideas were tossed around, everything from closing up shop to merging with Zoo Admin to buying more webspace from somewhere...eventually we decided to move the forum to Twilight's site and the downloads and homepage to my server. To keep from utterly losing everything on the site we had to act fast, which was why there was so little warning, and I apologize for that. After multiple disasters in trying to transfer the forum (the demise of Twilight's forum and the utter mangling of one of mine), we finally decided to start from scratch; the forum is now on my server, and the homepage is on Twilight's. Don't worry, all your tech support, downloads and other irreplaceable information HAS been saved and transferred to the new forum. However; you will have to reregister your usernames. I realize it will be a big hassle to update all your bookmarks and reregister, but please bear with us--we are doing what we can to make this transition easy on everyone. Unfortunately we cannot keep the zklounge.com domain name, at least not at the moment. Make no mistake, though, we are still the same ZKL! Aside from the location, very little is going to change.

A few admins have stepped down pending this process, and new ones have been appointed. The new admin team is composed of Troy, Jwa, Twilight and myself. Searain is going to take a long vacation, and when she returns she will remain on board as a Moderator in tech support.

There are some upsides to these changes: because we are sharing bandwidth over two servers (one of which is quite large), we now have the resources to run ZKL and will no longer require donations or banner ads to fund the site. Also, since the homepage is hosted on one site and the forum and downloads are on the other, even if one server goes down the other will stay up; you'll be able to reach ZKL one way or the other no matter what. The site will also be faster (hopefully) because it won't have to handle so much traffic all through a single server.

In closing this has been a hectic month for all of us, and we hope everyone will stay with us through this transition period. Super-duper thanks go to Searain, who kept a cool head throughout the whole ordeal and has been a great help setting up the new download archive--the girl deserves a break. Also thanks to Twilight, who has done a great job of getting the forum up and running on the new server. Jwa and Troy, you guys are the best, and thanks for sticking with us. Your help and knowledge are invaluable assets to ZKL. Thanks to Zoo Admin for offering their support, you are the best friends ZKL has. Thanks to Zookeeper for starting this wonderful site in the first place and footing the bill for so long. Finally, thanks to all the ZKL mods for helping transfer so many posts--I know it's brain numbing work--and thanks to the members who help make this site everything it is. ZKL would not be ZKL without its members!

Stay tuned. Good things are on the horizon...

-Luna