Something's wrong.
http://www.galleryoflights.org/ is offline.
"NOTICE: This domain name expired on 2/8/2014 and is pending renewal or deletion."

Oh, what happened?

Still not working for me.    

Hopefully Ian and/or Jace will respond,I hope the site can be renewed and not deleted.. 

The site is still there for now as for some weird reason my laptop can still access GoL instead of the Godaddy thing. Anyway I tried sending a test PM to you guys through GoL so let me know if you get a email notification for it.

I can't access GoL at all using both my phone and my iPad though, I get the same GoDaddy message as everyone else.

Hopefully Ian and or Jace will respond soon about this problem. Anyways I can probably afford part of the site costs in case we need to start a new site.

I tried to PM Ian from here, but he has still not responded yet.  We can still keep checking and post it here until the GoL is back on line.  I have pay raise from my work and I can squeeze some funding for the GoL near in the future

You can get into GoL by adding an entry to your hosts file.  The server is still up, only the domain expired.

In Windows the hosts file is typically located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\.  You must be a local admin to edit this file.  Simply add the following line.

72.29.81.201   www.galleryoflights.org

BEWARE, if you try this, remember you did it and be sure to undo the change once they renew their domain.  It will probably work for the near future, but could break weeks, months, or even years down the line if their IP changes.

Anyway, hopefully they get things straightened out.  Remember, you all are welcome here too.  I see a couple of you are talking about the possibility of a new site or taking over GoL, which is great if that's what you want to do.  I just hope that it's because you enjoy the variety of lighting enthusiast communities on the web, and not because you're unhappy here.  If any of you are ever dissatisfied with the way we run our site, feel free to speak up.

Hmm interesting. I'm not an admin there but maybe Joe, Vince, Dave D, or another admin could do it.

What's interesting is that some of us will have acess to the site at certain times and not others while other people have no acess to the site...

Oh no, no hard feelings towards the LG. It's all those pics on the GoL that can't be acessed now. I have nothing against the LG and I'm sure others don't either.

Maybe I wasn't entirely clear regarding those instructions.  Editing the hosts file is something you'd do on your own computer.  I meant that you must have administrative rights on your PC, not GoL.  Basically what happens is that when a domain expires the registrar changes DNS to point to the parked page you see now instead of the real site.  The real site is still live, under the original IP address.  However, in order to view it you must override DNS and associate the domain with the real IP address.  That's what happens when you add that line to your hosts file (might also require a browser restart).  Where you could run into problems is that if GoL changes IPs sometime in the future, the site will stop working for you with that line in your hosts files.  That's why I'm warning everyone that if you do it, remember to go back and delete the line once GoL renews their domain to avoid future issues.

So you might ask, why can't I just type the real IP address for GoL into my browser's address bar?  Wouldn't that work?  For some sites, at least those with a dedicated server, typing in an IP address will often bring up the desired page.  This won't work for GoL or our site for that matter, because we share IP addresses with other websites.  When the server gets a request by IP, it doesn't know which page to serve.  It relies on the host name for that.

Now, to answer your question about why some people can access the site as usual.  That's because their DNS servers or local DNS cache hasn't updated yet.  DNS is distributed and changes take time to propagate.  The amount of time can vary depending on a number of factors, including the TTL value.  Now if the registar is nice, they will set a low TTL on their own DNS servers for the parked page, allowing the site to come back online normally shortly after payment is received.  However, it is possible that it could take up to 24 hours for everyone to regain access.

Hmm. i did it but my computer is saying i don't have permission to save the changes in that location. I know the admin password but it didn't ask for it.

I would be happy to help with the cost for GoL renewal. I like both sites,I post pics on LG and GoL.

I wonder if calling the domain site (the go-daddy site) could help us get some answers. I've been PM'ing people and emailing people trying to seeif they can get in touch with Ian with no luck. He just...disappeared...

I was wondering what happened to the site. Hopefully all goes well. I can't really do much to help pay for the site unfortunately 

I wish good luck to members solving this issue 

I hope it gets resolved too. I haven't been able to access that site in several days.

Loosing the site won't be good at all  I hope one of them find out about it or realize before its too late to bring the site up again