I never read of any membership or lurking either. The whole situation is rather bizarre.
You can say that again. I think whatever happened must have be catastrophic. Nobody in their right mind would purchase a site and then let it be down for as long as it's been down. It's just bleeding value every day that it's down.
I agree... It seems almost impossible to believe that someone would buy it and just shut it down... Particularly since there was some effort put into making some changes before it went down... Myself and JohnnyVanWinkle were appointed 'Moderators', about 7 days maybe 10 days before it died. Now, I never had much of any contact with Burk123, other then a few brief personal messages one of which , where I agreed to a set of guidelines for being moderator... but I never got any direct email contact information from Burk123, nor did I or do I have any personal contact info about JohnnyVanWinkle ( I haven't seen him show up here yet either ). There appeared to be some minor changes made to some discussion categories ( New Grill section disapeared , 'new section' ( empty ) appeared... ) just before the initial intermittent problems surfaced. So, while there wasn't a ton of activity/changes being made, there was some effort being made to move forward with pelletheads...
During the time of initial intermittent problems, JohnnyVanWinkle indicated in a public post, that Burk123 was working with the hosting site to resolve those issues... then one day... it just went down, like it is now.
If I were to speculate... well, I can only guess that something truly catastrophic happend... with no backups??? But what I can't explain, is why a temporary page or something would not be put up , to at least give some idea of what to expect in the mean time... something like 'we are working on the problem'... or something. I'm by no means a expert in hosting web sites... but I do know a fair bit about how the internet works, and it should be trivial to put up a single page that says... 'coming soon' , or 'bear with us', or something...