This is largely Not My Business and i would be content to stay out of it if it weren't keeping my wife up at night. I don't have a ton to say that hasn't already been said (thanks miles for talking about this like an adult, etc) and i don't want to get caught up in the morality debate on who's responsible for the complete breakdown of the situation- again, unfortunate for everyone involved, but not my business. Some of the other replies got me thinking about a related issue, though.

A lot of people's emotional stake in this largely seems to be derived from the fact that homestuck dot com currently Sucks Ass, as it were. And that's understandable. I saw a few people (i'm not trying to be vague, i am literally just too lazy to go back through the thread looking for your names to @ you, sorry) asking why they have taken so long to do anything about it, and i feel like there's a pretty obvious answer here.

> basically, i spent like a solid year on and off as a go-between, trying to mediate between andrew and gio+bambosh (bambosh, notably, seemed really excited to work with us initially until talks deteriorated), from like september 2023 until i think like december 2024 or january of this year or whatever the hell.

They were negotiating to license the UHC for over a year. Basically ever since they got the license back from viz, up until this january, the plan was to license the UHC. Why would they fix up the website while they are licensing a fan project that's meant to replace it? Wasn't that the entire idea? They license the UHC, it becomes the Official Homestuck Collection or whatever the fuck, they put it up on the official website, bam, everything works, everything's nice and pretty, and they don't have to spend weeks or months of employees' time trying to replicate what other people already did. Not only would fixing the site at this point require a lot of time and effort, but like. That's work, they'd have to pay someone for that, and i don't think homestuck is exactly flush with cash at this point. Wouldn't be surprised if they didn't want to spend that much money just to have a backup in case the deal falls through. You could call that a bad management decision for sure- obviously they DID need a backup- but, you know, 20/20 hindsight and all that.

Why is it not done yet? I don't know, but it sure is a really long comic on an extremely broken website. Recreating all the flash games is probably a ton of work. It would be very nice if we had some kind of official news on what's being done and how far along they are, but i'm not surprised it's not ready yet, given the circumstances.

tldr: I believe work on fixing the website probably began no earlier than january of this year, because they had no reason to do it if the UHC licensing happened. Perhaps i'm making too many assumptions and leaps of logic? Sanity check me here. It feels very obvious to me that the purpose of licensing a collection of the original work would be to use it as the de facto way to read the work.