HEY, HERE’S SOMETHING SURPRISING - ANOTHER WEB SITE NETWORK COLLAPSES [Author: Lum the Mad]

Efront.com, home to Penny Arcade and Something Awful among others, are rumored to be finally throwing in the towel, after firing most of their staff last month and most recently ceasing any payouts “until further notice”.

The kicker here is that most of EFront’s affiliates actually signed over rights to their domain name in exchange for (now worthless) stock in EFront and (never recieved) monthly payments for advertising.

Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, who’s pretty much become the poster boy for bad luck in web hosting (his troubles with the now kaput GameFan network were well chronicled on his website) announced on his message board that he was finally throwing in the towel after this latest mess. (Note – SA’s forums are pretty much eating their own bag of hell at this point.)

eFront has just announced that since they have no money, nobody will be getting paid until at least February 19th.

As it stands right now, I am planning on closing this site at the end of next week and abandoning it forever. Thanks for everybody’s support and emails, but I’m not going to be accepting donations and I don’t plan on moving to a subscription / fee-based service. It’s been fun being screwed by various networks, but I’m sick of it. In the 13 months I’ve been doing this site, I haven’t been paid for 6 of them, and I can’t stand it any more.

Not much I can add to all this, except that it’s only going to get worse. If it gets better.