Gotta move on......

[karmathanever]

Hi everyone

I now seem to have little option but, after 20 years, to pullout of the Forums.

Why? ..you may ask (I’m sure you’ll not be too surprised):-

• My Admin privileges were removed when the “New look” forums returned (after the long outage) so I was no longer able to assist members in the same way.
• I have not been able to contact the owner for a very very long time having tried many times.
• The Forums site is still very insecure and so many great members have had their membership hacked with inappropriate posts (became impossible to keep up with).
• Everything I click on takes 45 seconds to respond. So, for example, removing a single hacker who has just posted 30 inappropriate across several forum sections would take me more than 2 hours…. etc…

I will keep my membership and drop by from time to time.

I wish you all a fabulous ongoing musical life and am so grateful for all the help and friendship over the past 20 years.

Take GREAT care

Pete

[Gunnar J]

Hi Pete.

Sad to see how this forum goes these days, and even more sad to see knowledgeable and helpful members leave.
Here is a huge amount of great posts and info that may be lost if forum continue downwards as we see it happen.

Pete, I think you will be more than welcome if you peek into https://yamahamusicians.com/forum/index.php
There is a dedicated Korg part that was created as an alternative when this one was down and people wondered if it ever would be back.
https://yamahamusicians.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=211

See you there?

[D575]

Quote from, Saul @ Yamahamusicians.com

"There is always a home for karmathanever as moderator here at our forums. His expertise would be very welcome."

Hopefully, we will see you over there, Pete.

[karmathanever]

THANKS!!

I will definitely check that out (probably in about a week's time)

Pete

[Gunnar J]

THANKS!!

I will definitely check that out (probably in about a week's time)

Pete

That's good news!

[dexman]

Welcome aboard Pete!

[voip]

The slowness of the forum isn't a major issue here. I find it is often convenient to open up a Notepad window and type replies into that, to avoid the forum timeout from losing an answer, especially if that answer takes a while to verify that it actually works in practice.

I plan on sticking around here for a while.

.

[dexman]

While I will still be dropping in, the lack of communication/interest in the site by the new owner is troubling. We don't know who Sharp sold the site to. Whoever they are, they migrated it to a provider with extremely laggy/sluggish service. They don't reply to messages from users and stripped much administrative power from Pete.

It doesn't look good.

[StephenKay]

Is it true that Sharp sold the site to someone else? I hadn't heard that before... It still says "owned by Irish Acts Studio" up at the top.

(Of course, I don't come here as often as I used to either, because everything takes so dang long...)

[dexman]

Hi Stephen,

It appears that he sold the site. Pete (karmathanever) has tried to contact Sharp for a while now and there has been no response. He has also lost much of his admin capabilities.

Saul (the Admin over at yamahamusicians) did some digging and found that this site is no longer hosted by Korg.

I've tried to contact Sharp and whoever "Admin1" is, but no response either way.

The extremely slow response to clicks has become problematic to many...including me.

Despite the name, Yamahamusicians has a dedicated Korg forum.

I'll be spending my time at both locations but admit that the sluggish performance & lack of response from the site Admins here has me favoring YM. Experienced users like Gunnar & Pete are Global Moderators. I'm a "sub-newbie" when it comes to Workstations & Arrangers, so I'm just a regular user at both locations. Two months ago, I purchased a Kronos 3 and will be interested to see what KARMA can do. This beast of a board has a major learning curve.

Is there any chance you would be willing to sign on with YM? I'm fairly certain that Saul would grant you Global Moderator status.

Paul

[KK]

FWIW, this is what I get from the smartest AIs (and remember they are still not that bright, so take this info with a grain of salt).

• Ownership: The forums remain owned by Irish Acts Recording Studio (run by Sharp), an independent operation unaffiliated with Korg Inc. This hasn't changed as no evidence of a sale or transfer to another entity.

• Historical Hosting: For years, Korg USA provided free hosting as a courtesy, which is why the footer still credits them. However, Korg appears to have quietly discontinued this support sometime in 2023–2024, leading to the extended maintenance mode and downtime issues from late 2024.

• Current Hosting Shift: To keep things running, the site migrated to Site5/SingleHop for infrastructure. This explains what you're noticing:

- The domain's nameservers are dns.site5.com and dns2.site5.com (confirmed via WHOIS).
- The site's IP address (69.74.200.93) traces back to servers managed by SingleHop, with backend tech like Microsoft IIS/7.5 and ASP.NET.
- This is a routine backend change during the site's "upgrade" phase—Sharp was seeking help for updates and migration, but no full handover occurred.

Hopefully, Sharp is OK and well. It is sad though for this site, as there are tons of very useful info and also many have left since it is very slow.

[dexman]

FWIW, this is what I get from the smartest AIs (and remember they are still not that bright, so take this info with a grain of salt).

• Ownership: The forums remain owned by Irish Acts Recording Studio (run by Sharp), an independent operation unaffiliated with Korg Inc. This hasn't changed as no evidence of a sale or transfer to another entity.

• Historical Hosting: For years, Korg USA provided free hosting as a courtesy, which is why the footer still credits them. However, Korg appears to have quietly discontinued this support sometime in 2023–2024, leading to the extended maintenance mode and downtime issues from late 2024.

• Current Hosting Shift: To keep things running, the site migrated to Site5/SingleHop for infrastructure. This explains what you're noticing:

- The domain's nameservers are dns.site5.com and dns2.site5.com (confirmed via WHOIS).
- The site's IP address (69.74.200.93) traces back to servers managed by SingleHop, with backend tech like Microsoft IIS/7.5 and ASP.NET.
- This is a routine backend change during the site's "upgrade" phase—Sharp was seeking help for updates and migration, but no full handover occurred.

Hopefully, Sharp is OK and well. It is sad though for this site, as there are tons of very useful info and also many have left since it is very slow.

The thing that doesn't make sense is that changing who hosts the site wouldn't account for Karmathanever losing much of his administrative capabilities. The scaled down administrative powers would seem to portend a new "boss" is running the site...hence the newest member is "admin1".

[Mike Conway]

Some really great memories here. I joined this forum when the OASYS came out. Holy cow, has it really been 21 years? It's sad that traffic is so slow going, now. I don't want it to go away, but it could use some tender loving care. Since Sharp isn't around, am I allowed to mention that I usually hang out at Gearspace and a couple of other places?

I've looked at that Yamaha forum, with the Korg Forums section. I'll probably join up just so I can continue to hang with my Korg friends. I have some Yamaha gear, of course.

This Korg Forums is okay, when the speed is fast. Tonight, I'm actually able to click through different sections, fairly quick. Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well!

[voip]

When logged in, it's possible to see that six of the registered users online right now are bots or spiders, and it's likely that quite a few of the unregistered users are going to be of a similar ilk, all scraping the life out of the forum (for free!!). Forums, unlike other social media, are generally highly regarded in the world of search engines and AI as extremely valuable information sources. I've noticed that things posted on here, and other forums, find their way into search engine results pretty damn sharpish. The knowledge and opinion stored in the forum's myriad pages, is effectively a largely curated, validated, and context-rich dataset, of huge value to the information economy.

Korgforums probably exists entirely on one single server. There is no content distribution network to spread the bandwidth load, and satisfy the huge appetites of the bots, so the human users suffer.

.

[voip]

When I first joined the forum, just a mere 11 years ago the site was positively buzzing. Although the rate of new postings is way down on what it was then, I suspect that many of the questions that newly acquired Korg product users have, are being satisfied with the existing forum content. I receive regular reminders of this, when I get notifications that files I have put on cloud servers, in response to forum questions, have been downloaded, so the interest is still there.

And the OASYS is still "the beast"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yyNlHpSYok

.