I'm not deeply involved in the RHDN community, but have been somewhere nearby for over a decade. I have no vested interest in defending Nightcrawler (the owner/

I'm not deeply involved in the RHDN community, but have been somewhere nearby for over a decade. I have no vested interest in defending Nightcrawler (the owner/creator of the site). But I feel I should do so as the existing commentary surrounding this event makes out as if there were two equally justifiable positions at odds. The creator and owner (since 2005!) of the website has explained their situation. They: - cited reasons for their general desire to move away from the site in recent years. Namely increasing costs (financial, work, effort) to maintain the site in the face of ever increasing legal threats, bots/scraping, etc.. This has been public knowledge -- in general -- for over a year, at least. - made a relatively specific accusation ~~ being doxxed by the "insiders" that had offered and took steps to take over as successor/s - explained the perfectly rational (in the face of the alleged mistreatment) decision to wind down operation of the site and cut ties with the extended ("second-party"?) community channels - provided reliable, free, public access to the unique (community created) data hosted on the site -- through archive.org - kept the site up and stated their intention to do so as a read-only archive - posted on the front page of the site informing everybody of all of this This is a good move. They are making good decisions in a bad situation. The opposing view being (over re-)presented is that the owner of site didn't accept some offer of help at some point in the last decade and as the only person with full control over the site, ... they had full control over the site. Of course, having such a large repository of cultural artifacts at the mercy of an individual isn't a good long-term plan. Wanting to avoid catastrophe should something terrible happen is perfectly reasonable. However, the news is that this current reality is the one where the disaster (loss of the unique data) has been averted.