October 31, 2010

Hello there,

I presume you’re reading this because you used to visit a little website called Dissendium.com and, having noticed that it disappeared off the face of the Earth in November 2008, have come along to our former home today to see if anything’s magically appeared in the meantime. It has. And you’re reading it. And this is even version two!

Foremost, let me apologise for that disappearing act. While I’d love to blame dark forces, grindylows or hinkypunks, I’m afraid the fault is entirely my own. Dissendium imploded following a disagreement with our old web host, who unplugged us from the internet after wrongly accusing us of not paying our bills. After this incident, I was just too busy to move Dissendium to a different host and get everything back online. I really regret that, over the past few years, Dissendium’s dedicated community was debased and some of our regular visitors had no other homes to go to.

Many visitors and staff members have repeatedly asked me to reinstate Dissendium and I had initially pledged to do so. I at least wanted to restore the forums so that Dissendium's community could reunite and evolve. However, the pressures of 'real life' have taken their toll and I'm afraid there's simply no time in my life these days for Dissendium. When I opened this site 13 years ago, albeit under a different title (we were 'DiagonSoft' back then), I was a mere twelve-year-old and life wasn't enormously taxing. These days I have rent to pay, relationships to maintain and a doctoral thesis to finish. As you can probably guess, right now I'm procrastinating the latter. Does anyone know anything about orang-utans?

Dissendium will be back one day -- that much I promise you -- but it's unlikely to return until I have a decent amount of time on my hands. I suggest you check back in about 40 years' time when I'm collecting my pension and am in need of a hobby. By which time you'll all be too busy flying around on your jet-packs and will be entirely disinterested in Dissendium. In the meantime, to re-connect with old friends, I suggest you visit www.orphanedwizard.com, a site created by =DTM=Ace as a halfway house for homeless Dissendium wizards. If you're interested in Dissendium's 'Quidditch 3D', a rather helpful chap has been kind enough to violate all of our terms and conditions and re-distribute it on a dedicated website. Kudos to him, though you didn't hear it from me...

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Graham