You're going to have to excuse the length of this post, but this concerns the well-being of this site.
I don't know how many of you keep up with the news, but, here in America, there is a very scary piece of legislation that is being debated that literally amounts to internet censorship here in the U.S. in its current form. It's called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).
Gamespot has a good summary of the bill: http://www.gamespot.com/features/sopa-t ... t-6346561/
So does this Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhwuXNv8fJM
In a nutshell: the internet over here in America looks like its going to be bedfellows with the internet they have in China. The only difference is, this censorship is in the guise of laws that "protect" copyright.
Though we do already have some very authoritative internet legislation here in the U.S., If this bill passes, Legends World, and many other sites like ours, are officially going to be put on the endangered list. If a company or some loser tattletale sees fit, they could have this site removed from search engines, have its funding cut off, and, ultimately, prevent users from accessing it at all.
If you think that this is going to just affect sites like ours, tech experts have been saying that, given the broad and open language the act currently has, it could be used to shut down practically any website that so much as mentions or uses just one piece of copyrighted content. So that means sites like Youtube, Google, Reedit, and Wikipedia could be shut down.
What's scary is that this bill could've passed at its markup day last week. Despite the knowledge spouted by many tech experts, letters, petitions, thousands of calls to congress men and women, and even a letter from engineers who are credited with creating the internet, they're just not listening. It would apparently seem that, once again, money given by big interest groups (namely the MPAA, RIAA, and numerous unions) have made our representatives here in the U.S. willing to abandon common sense and ethics... again.
Thankfully, a vote wasn't taken. However, the house judiciary is going to possibly take a vote this Wednesday (December 21). So me and the other U.S. based Legends World users could see the beginning of the end for our internet if a vote is taken.
I want to see Legends World survive as much as you guys, but if this bill passes then we here in the U.S. are going to have to wave goodbye to coming here anymore. Of course, we could find other non-traditional ways to get here, but then we're not only putting ourselves at risk with the law, we're putting our computers at risk because of how risky it is to use things like alternate servers and proxies.
Just for the heck of it, I tried putting in the IP address for Legends World since that's a method for accessing sites that the act neglected to fight against. But I'm merely redirected to the main site of the server Legends World is hosted on. So that means that, while such a method may work for other sites, it's not going to work for Legends World and that means me and other U.S. users are going to have to take riskier measures to come here should the law be passed.
I think that we need to brace for the worst should this bill pass. Granted, it would still need to pass congress and be signed into law by our "great" president before it can take effect, which does give us the people who oppose it some more time to combat it. But, given the horrendously corrupt government we have over here in America (they're signing the NDAA into law without the people's consent for god's sake), I wouldn't be surprised if they take yet another privilege we little people have over here.
Plus, if SOPA is prevented from being codified into law, there's the E-Parasite act to worry about, which is pretty much round 2 of possible American internet censorship.