I don't think Abovo's attitude has changed much... I'd say it was just as bad in principle. It's just natural for the website to deteriorate as no maintenance has been done from the beginning, as the original redesign at the time was harmful rather than the intended improvement, then as traffic decayed, both because of declining public interest in abandonware in general, and because of the website's deterioration, as volunteer crew got tired and left and were not replaced, and as the ones who remained can't do much to fix things, and as decaying traffic motivates Abovo to look for fringe sources of income.

It wouldn't be so much about reclaiming this particular website or domain. The value of Abandonia, at least for us users and crew who don't make money out of it, was the community. We could have taken that elsewhere and rebuilt our own website. There were some discussions about it, but nothing came out of them eventually.

Nowadays that games can be sold online instead of on disks, most of our visitors are serviced by GOG and others. We people who are interested in games so obscure that even GOG doesn't offer them, are also older and more hardcore, and as Spectre says there are other torrent etc. websites where we can retreat.

Brief history: Kosta created the site, then, about 2010, he lost interest and went to freeware games (abandonia reloaded, if I am not mistaken), selling Abandonia to Studentis. Studentis was absorbed by Abovo soon, and Abovo mutated to what we have now. So it was claimed at least twice. :)

Kosta didn't go to Reloaded, he went on to his job and couldn't keep dedicating so much time to hobby websites. Reloaded had been founded earlier, from the same community. And it was sold to Studentis together with Abandonia, and now Abovo owns both. The only difference is that Reloaded didn't get the redesign amd reimplementation that Abandonia got.

Supposedly Studentis went broke or something and Abovo bought Abandonia off, but at least from our point of view there's been precious little difference between them.

Ah, sorry, I came into this site after Kosta departed, but I had impression that he visited Reloaded some time after Abandonia was left. Can be wrong, of course. *shrug* No matter to history of acquisitions anyway. :)

I donated to the site a few years ago, back when I was already skeptical to do so because the website is entirely unencrypted. (Asking for money and then not encrypting traffic is a really bad idea.) Now, after skimming through this thread, I understand why: it completely fell out of use and has now been taken over by a business that has no real desire to handle the website properly. I would have said "why not move?" but with the lack of site maintainers that seems difficult.

It's sad to read what happened and it's sad to have seen things deteriorate. I'm glad there are more abandonware websites out there but sometimes I do only find a thing over here so in a way I am still grateful that this place still exists.

eXoDOS discord is some good place for me, if you are after old games. https://discord.gg/AyrzSngx