I have been kinda worried about something lately, because I want to make sure that Omni is staying up in long terms with plans for continued blood refreshing. I'm not worried about sudden member activity slumps like last Summer and this month since the TI community is cyclic and we might get nDoom-esque activity next school year with the new 84+CSE, but rather making sure that Omni will remain online, alive, for many years to come.

If you haven't noticed lately, only one single forum admin is regularly active posting publicly anymore on the forums and two on IRC: Shmibs and Qwerty.55. In Deep Thought's case, even his IRC bots are gone, but it might be due to 57o9 shutdown. I am not sure what the rest is up to, but one of them suddenly vanished off the face of the earth last month and the others have been showing up less and less since a year for some reasons. I don't know about staff boards activity, so maybe they're more active than I think (some rather quiet days still show 100-200 posts figures sometimes). What worried me, though, is that shmibs (I think) said he was unable to reach the inactive admins at all, and in my case, he was the only one to answer any PM I sent to the entire admin team in the last 2 months.

1) I was wondering if this is directly caused by the "major Omnimaga upgrade" mentionned a few times before on IRC by Qwerty since last Summer? If so, then disregard all questions below because this update is most likely requiring a crapload of work and taking a long time (assuming of course it's still active).
2) Is it due to school/work? If so, then are there any future plans to renew the team if any manager are ever forced to permanently stay inactive like last year's successful staff restructure? (So that in 1-2 years the site doesn't head the same path as United-TI did a few years ago due to staff shortage)
3) Is 57o9 shutdown preventing certain admins from visiting Omnimaga and IRC (via ZNC shells and stuff)? Sadly, I don't think that host is coming back.
4) Has some of the admins just decided to move on silently or has something really bad happened in their respective lives? I hope the latter isn't the case (especially not like JustCause) and it's their choice if they decide to move on, but if any of them are directly involved in paying the hosting/domain name bills and keeping the site online, then I think it would be important for the other admins to beg for the FTP, hosting bill payments, domain names and hosting account login information so that you can take over and make sure the site remains safe (see what happened to Revsoft in 2011).
5) Can members and staff like myself still help financially? I made over $200 in music sales in less than 1 year (most of which came from A Decade of Magic Hardcore) and can help besides just music sales, but first I need to be sure that there is still somebody behind the Netham45 name that is monitoring the PayPal donations address and the hosting bills on a regular basis.

Just making sure that Omni is still safe. Of course no hard feelings will be held if one or more admins/staff decided to move on from the community or simply have no choice to permanently become inactive, but I would surely not be happy if one day I checked every admin profile, only to see that none has logged in within the last months and one year later to be greeted with a parked domain page upon typing Omnimaga.org.

@1: Thanks for the info . I assumed there would be lots of compatibility issues if that's the upgrade I think about, because I attempted it in 2009 on both TIMGUL/Omni. The TIMGUL attempt was a disaster, while the Omnimaga one was cancelled due to the work ahead (having to redo the entire theme from scratch/lots of incompatible mods). I hope it's not Invisionboard, though, because its security is horrible despite being a paid software.

@2: Ok. Just making sure that there are still enough managers who still have plans to contribute to Omni in the future. (UTI only had 2 active ones a few years ago and they died a year or two later, but MaxCoderz still survives with 1)

@3: Yeah I was mostly wondering in case some admins have no other way to access IRC/Omni at all due to parental/school/work filters or something. I myself can't connect to IRC from certain places because EFnet is blocked now >.<. Maybe Omninet's primary server needs to be switched to Alberthro? (Since just using irc.omnimaga.org no longer works and the other URLs are very hard to remember)

@4: Ok good to hear. Just wanted to make sure that Omni team is safe from any Revsoft-like scenario (where Jim_e couldn't even be reached by phone anymore and he was the only one who had access to files), especially that anything can happen like getting grounded, ending up at the hospital like Juju last year, getting hit by lightning (like what happened to all Netham45's computers and servers in June 2008) or other stuff I don't wish for anyone.

@5: That's good then . I haven't donated in a while but I am glad I can still do so. Again just making sure there are no Jim_e-like scenario on the verge of happening or something  although now that I know that multiple admins can help then I guess it doesn't matter as much.

Well since Netham45 is still officially monitoring Omni and stuff then it should be safe anyway

In long terms this could be necessary if Alberthrocks ever shut down Witgh.us, though, since it hosts OmnomIRC separately.

Don't you use Alberthrocks hosting, though?

*withg accounts
omnomirc is one of the withg servers
And yeah, i have a own server by now.

Even though I'm a high school senior, I continue to work as hard as I can to maintain good grades, and it's hard and time-consuming! (And on top of that, I do a lot of work in FIRST Robotics, which is coming up...)

Nevertheless, I still maintain the Omnimaga services that I host. The only reason things have been going down is because my VPS provider is being silly - and my response is rather slow Sorunome has taken over (for the most part) OmnomIRC coding and features, as well as the New post bot, both of which are hosted on withg.

As for others, 57o9's going poof has been a major activity decrease causer (at least on IRC), since a lot of data (and accounts) were on that server. It's not even known if the data is recoverable at all. (In case withg users are wondering, the main server withg.org has daily backups, though I'm planning to change backup providers soon. Hmm, that's where my money is being drained... )

So yeah, the "state of the Omnimaga" from my perspective.

As for withgusto, I do not plan to shut it down for a loooong time. If anything big, I may decide to sell it to someone and let them take over. However, I will be eventually moving to a 100% donation-supported service, since I will be going to college soon and footing the massive tuition bill! (No worries - from time to time, I will pitch in. If it ever comes to a point where donations stop, I'll backup all the data and make sure at least 2 admins have it before it is shut down.)

I wonder if juju actually had backups of 57o9. He could maybe hand them to you or someone else so he can host them elsewhere. I think money might be an issue actually, otherwise 57o9 would be back up by now. As for Julosoft I don't know how reliable it is.

Even if you don't see the admins around, they have been hovering in the background. Deep Thought and Shmibs are actually pretty active and have running projects. I wouldn't worry.