Chapter 1: Website Down! The Investigation Begins – Lost the Plot, The Plot Thickens Chronicles

9th – 12th January 2023

Read on, or return to The Plot Factory Chronicles (Ver. 1) Home Page.

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9th January: The initial reaction

As Plot Factory wasn’t a “massive” platform, the original shutdown on the 9th of January 2023 was only noticed by a handful of frequent users, leading to rumours spreading spuriously across the internet.

A Reddit user raised the alarm, though only a handful of people demonstrated similar distress (or empathy) for their plight of having lost their work. Many of them encouraged those affected to take legal action, especially if the website hosted original content.

(Wait, “crime”?! I hear you say. Well, more on that later.)

NameBright: The domain registry

A few Twitter users shouted into the aether, wondering whether it was “just them” or if the website was indeed down and out.

One user reported that they had contacted the domain host, NameBright, who had been less than helpful in providing information. Speculation began that J might have been unable to regain access to the domain for renewal because a third party held the URL hostage after he let the subscription lapse.

This was exceedingly unlikely, though. For one thing, a domain does not automatically become available after the expiry date. According to NameBright T&Cs, users have a 60 grace period to renew their subs before the domain is released for others to use.

Upon expiration of your domain name […]
The registrant of an expired domain will be given no less than 30 days to pay for the renewal of the domain before the domain enters a Redemption Grace Period (“RGP”).
[Then] If you fail to renew your domain through the end of the expiration of the domain (30 days from the domain name’s expiration date) that domain will enter Redemption Grace Period (aka “RGP”). Once a domain enters RGP status you will have 30 days to “redeem” the domain at the standard redemption period price.
In other words, if the domain name is not renewed or redeemed within 60 days following the expiration, the domain will be irretrievable.

NAMEBRIGHT.COM TERMS OF SERVICE, 14-15. [retrieved 2023-01-25 from archive.ph]

So, short of his domain being literally hacked prior to the domain’s expiration, it was highly anyone was holidng a middling website like Plot Factory hostage. Even if they were, the domain is nothing in the greater scheme of things and obtaining a workaround address – a quick and cheap alternative – would have been easy to do, if such a thing happened.

A quick look at the NameBright records demonstrates that this really was a simple case of J allowing the domain payment to lapse:

The renewal date for “Plotfactory.com” falls on 9th January every year at 0:00 UST. While NameBright offers an auto-renewal for domains, it appears that J never had this option enabled.

In fact, there is evidence that he had allowed this to happen before. For instance, on 9th January 2022 Plot Factory also went down for a few hours:

Coincidence? Maybe, but it’s a pretty funny one.

Attempts were made to contact NameBright, similar to the Twitter user mentioned before, but they stated that only the account holder could reactivate the address. This was true on two counts: for obvious reasons, they had no incentive to restore Plot Factory (especially if they believed J was unable to pay fees) and, even if they did, and the community claimed ownership of the domain, it would do nothing to allow them to access the host servers where their content was held.

No, the only way to resolve the problem was for J to crawl out of the woodworks and pay the fees he owed NameBright.

A quick aside about J

J is an interesting character, to say the least. The best way to describe him is an ‘ideas man’. He founded Plot Factory in 2018 after doing research with other writers on Reddit.

Many of the features that were worked into Plot Factory came from this development and research period, as one of the testers would later recount:

Figure 1.8 A/B: A beta tester’s story.

However, as mentioned on the Lost the Plot: The Plot Factory Chronicles landing page, J’s activity had been steadily decreasing over a period of 18 months before Plot Factory’s inglorious outage and between May 2022 to November 2022, he was completely AWOL with members having to wait months for any attempts to ping him in the Discord server.

So, some members of the community decided to try and ‘hunt’ J down through other means: Google, searching for his known socials and email accounts. Needless to say, they were not about to let him get away with ignoring them.

Unfortunately, what the uncovered was far from reassuring.

More on J and this revelation, as well as the circumstantial evidence that this is, indeed, the same man, will be in the next update, ‘Chapter 2: The Man Behind the Curtain’. Back to the authors and users of the Plot Factory Community…

Thankfully, hope was on the way in the form of a workaround – a ‘backdoor’, if you will – to access Plot Factory, brought unto the community by one referred to henceforth as ‘A Hero’.

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10th January: The first backdoor workaround

From the moment work reached the ears of our Hero, they were trying to find a way for everyone to regain access to their accounts despite the domain being expired.

What the Hero discovered was that users could still access by editing the host files on their computers.

The reason Plot Factory was inaccessible to the users was because the “canonical name” had been changed to ‘expire.namebright.com’, due to the unpaid bill. However, by editing the host files, users could manually allow their computers to resolve domain names to an IP address, without having to go through the DNS resolution.

Note: If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry — neither did I! You can look at this YouTube video that explains a DNS resolution i.e. what happens when we ordinarily access a website.

As the Hero explained it, “it tricks your laptop into thinking the URL is that IP in the hosts file.” This process is generally used by website developers to test and use websites without affecting the servers directly.

To cut a long story short, users were instructed to follow this process depending on their operating system.

What made the efforts of the Hero to aid the grief-stricken Plot Factory community so appreciated (and remarkable) was that he himself was not a long-time user of the website.

Figure 1.8: The Hero explains how he came to the Plot Factory discord by chance.

While the resolution was simple, there is no denying that the Hero saved the panicked authors hours upon hours of anxiety and time by working out a means to access the website and relaying it to the team.

I wish to stress how utterly flummoxed the community were – and that most of us were not especially techy. Had it not been for the Hero, many more days could’ve have passed before this possible backdoor was discovered, if it was ever uncovered at all.

For that, we owe Sir Hero our deepest gratitude.

Now the writers had the means to access their content again, everyone was encouraged to back up all of their work manually, including any invoices and receipts. Much like the Titanic in the early stages of its sinking, just because the passengers can’t see the water coming in doesn’t mean you should stay on the ship rather than climb into a lifeboat.

It was off the back of this workaround that another place was born: The Plot Thickens.

‘The Plot Thickens’ is founded

The Plot Thickens was to act as a dedicated server for anyone affected by the Great Plot Factory Dumpster Fire of January 2023.

Founded on 11th January by one of the users in the original (OG) PF discord, henceforth referred to as ‘The Author’ (her rank on The Plot Thickens), its purpose was to serve as a safe space for the backdoor workaround relayed by the Hero.

It quickly became a place where authors commiserated with each other and shared opinions on other writing tools, now they were sure that Plot Factory was likely dead and down (at least for the foreseeable future).

As word of Plot Factory’s alledged demise spread across the internet, bewildered clients began to find invote links to ‘The Plot Thickens’ spread across platforms where they would be most likely to look for information on why PF was down, particularly Plot Factory’s status page on saashub.

The news even reached the ears of the CEO of another writing website. She posted nformation about some of the services her own project used that Plot Factory also did, such as the payment app, Stripe, and the server host, Cloudflare, as well as general insights from a business owner’s perspective.

If nothing else, it sure hit home to the client base for Plot Factory how utterly their site’s CEO had failed them.

With trust in PF dead, it did not take long for The Plot Thickens to become, effectively, a support group. The authors felt safer moving themselves (and what they had discovered) from the OG server to the new one. After all, by keeping everything hosted in a separate server, they could ensure everything remained both easy to access and protected should J choose to hide or wipe the OG discord serve when (or if) he ever returned.

J had done something similar before in 2020, which again will be explored in Chapter 2, so these fears were not unfounded. As well as this, there was a general feeling amongst the community that J might not want to see how utterly and thoroughly the community delved into his circumstances or the wild rumours that began to swirl as a result of their findings.

And boy, did the community delve.

Very, very far.

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Cliffhanger: But wait, where is J?!

Originally, the circumstances surrounding J were going to be covered at the end of this post.

Doubtless, there are many readers here who will have heard the rumours – or had their interests piqued by the hints throughout this chapter.

Arrested?

Charged?

Criminal?!

Bottom line is that a lot was found, enough to warrant its own chapter along with all the build up to downage of PF between 9th January 2023 – 3rd February 2023. Due to the build-up to Plot Factory’s outage being so heavily tied to to management and actions of J in the 18 months proceeding PF dropping off the face of the internet, I concluded that it needed its own chapter to breathe.

Furthermore, just because the site is ‘up’ as of typing this (12th March 2023, though there was another outage on 3rd March 2023, so its by no means stable), doesn’t make everything that happened in January 2023 go away.

And sadly, what was covered in this chapter only begins to scratch the surface of the problems with Plot Factory.com.

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Next Chapter: Chapter 2: The Man Behind the Curtain – Lost the Plot, The Plot Thickens Chronicles

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