Right now, if you go to Subguns, you get this...
I wish Frank the best, and hope the Subguns downtime is temporary.
The following is speculative on my part, but I do know a bit about how Subguns' website runs. For a few years, around the turn of the century, we hosted it on our server, and the URL used to redirect you to our Biggerhammer site. Those who remember way back, there was a period of time when if you typed in 'Subguns.com" it would automatically redirect you to "subguns.biggerhammer.net." Sturm and Subguns were run on the same type of software, circa 1999. That software stopped having any support after about 2002. I believe that Subguns had some custom updates made to it after that, but the discussion forum still ran on what is essentially 1990's software until it was taken down recently. Perhaps they have figured out a way to migrate any archived content. That would be awesome, but I also know that would be difficult to translate into a new format, and there are no member logins, so assigning any posts to existing members on another platform would be at least a partially manual process. Think about how you typed in your name every time you logged onto Subguns, or the old Sturm. There were no member accounts. Think 1990's...As such, the software today could be easily corrupted, damaged unintentionally, or potentially messed with.
That was the main reason we made the decision to go to the new forum software for Sturm in 2016. That, and we wanted regular support, instead of selling t-shirts and other efforts that never fully funded the site, and pulled many monthly dollars from my wallet for over 12 years.
We'll see what happens. Maybe they will be down for a couple of weeks, and then return to service. There's a long history of behind the scenes cooperation between the two sites, the extent of which is really only known or acknowledged by the principle folks who used to be involved. No Subguns mods are fully aware of what I'm talking about. Frank has also been very friendly to Sturm, and I hope that he works through any IT issues that may be contributing to the current Subguns downtime.
In the meantime, please feel free to post on the discussion boards here, or if you are a serious collector, post on Machinegunboards.com.
David Albert
dalbert@sturmgewehr.com