For the last few days inform7.com has been unavailable. The site is the official host of the Inform 7 IDE.
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that the outage is due to an unexpected error that affected the CMS for the Inform 7 website and that work is underway to try to bring the site back online as soon as possible.
I tweeted Emily Short and the IFTF Foundation to ask if they knew about the outage, and I got these replies:
Yes. Graham is working on it, but this involves building a replacement website, and it is not done yet.
— Emily Short (@emshort) June 24, 2019
Yes, Graham is working on it. Thanks.
— IF Technology Foundation (@IFTFoundation) June 24, 2019
I assume that the outage is due to Graham Nelson preparing the site for the upcoming changes to Inform that he announced at the recent NarraScope conference, but as far as I’m aware there hasn’t been any official warning about the outage, nor a full explanation of the reason for it, beyond the tweets I’ve quoted above.
The upshot is that if you want to download and use the current version of Inform 7 right now, you can’t. Which seems a bit of a shame.
You can still download Inform 7 from the Interactive Fiction Archive. http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform7/executables/
For what it’s worth, not every part of the website is down–the bugtracker is up at http://inform7.com/mantis. Probably this is because it runs on separate Mantis web design stuff. (The uservoice site is down but I believe that happened before the current outage.)
It’s back up!