Hello!
Welcome back to Blender Artists! As you all know the site has been down for a while now. But now it’s back, hopefully stronger than ever!
Over the course of the last week a lot of things have been happening behind the scenes. As most of you probably know by now, our beloved Roel (Goofster) has stepped down as the owner/maintainer. He has spent the last 10 years helping to make this site a reality and he deserves every ounce of credit we can give him.
In his stead, myself and Wes Burke are stepping in to take the reins and help Blender Artists get back on it’s feet with the help of CG Cookie / Blender Cookie. We are very honored, humbled and proud to have been approached to help drive the site and to carry it on to the next level.
Through the excitement, there is the understanding of immense responsibility and focus to maintain the Blender Artists site and the ways of operation. Having originally learned Blender with the help of this community, Blender Artists is very close to my heart and I aim to help in any way I can to continue maintaining and building this community. This of course would not be possible without the help of the excellent Wes Burke who has taken on most of the administration duties while I will be helping with more of the moderation side. Speaking of which, I would also like to take this time to give a shout out to all of the current and past moderators and thank them for their continued support in helping this community thrive. Both Wes and myself hope to see you all stick around!
In these next few weeks, as the site is starting to re-emerge and gain strength, we ask that you please bare with us as the team works to fight some of the code and styling. There is a lot left to do but Roel is helping us troubleshoot some of the remaining tasks.
Things to know/expect during this transition period:
- Blender Artists will remain an independent, vibrant community/website with it’s own identity
- Blender Artists remains an open and freely accessible resource for the Blender Community, and ALL educators.
- Blender Artists is to remain a central hub for Blender users to connect with other users, artists and developers.
All in all, Blender Artists is to stay the exact same site everyone has come to love over the years.
Wes and I have been anxious to get this hub back in everyone’s hands, and will be working over the next few weeks to polish it and strive for a stable state. In this course there will be some moves within the hosting environment on Rackspace to allow for further growth of Blender Artists.
Thank you all for your patience and for being such an awesome community!
-Jonathan Williamson (previously known as mr_bomb)
Blender cookie, support requests, forum management etc.
I actually had a script monitoring the site for return.