Wasn't able to get a hold of him. Will try again though.

I tried the e-mail he answered me with in 2013 and on facebook with no luck on both sides..

I guess a valid option would be contacting the hosting company, letting them know about the situation, point them to the discussion and asking them to give the actual contact details of Erik or in case he passed away ... give us a backup.
As far as I remember, there was another admin, right? What about him?

Im also still here, checking the site from time to time. Count me in in case you need money or anything else.
Cheers from Argentina, I hope we can keep this site running.

I got a reply from Erik by email:

"I know it's a shame what happened to the website, but I am just to engulfed with too many other things to take care of it. I am happy to hear if you have a plan!
Looking forward to your answer, Erik"

In any case, I'll try to procure the code and the database. From there we can look further if we rehost it somewhere else, at least we will still have a backup.

Kind regards,
Inferno

I also got a reply by e-mail fro Erik saying he's willing to put some time into helping us take over. here's what he had to say :

"regrettably I missed what seems to have been the kind of discussion I
have been waiting for for so long. In case you and the other people
involved, I would be happy to have a discussion with everyone to
figure out how to best rescue the site!

I am willing to spend some time on helping out in the process. What is
most important to me is that there is a group of people behind this
endeavour to avoid the eventual failure of my one-man "approach"
during the last years.

Please let me know what the current status is and if you/we could
arrange for some kind of effective discussion in the nearest future.
Only Facebook does not work for me though.

Thank you so much for staying behind the site after so many years! I
am hopeful that we can relaunch it, with your and the communities
help!

Best wishes, looking forward to your reply,
Erik"

Thanks Inferno and Baubbi for the update and great to hear that there is still feedback from Erik.

Great news !!

If we have the code, we can use some modern solutions to prevent challenges from get broken, or at least repair it fast and automatically, like using containers for some challenges or vms.
Also, we can publish some more immersive challenges, for example some local exploit or another thing, since nowadays VMs are cheap easy to create some isolation e easy to give access to.

But focusing on saving this whole website I would recommend to create a solution that prevent this very same situation to happen again in the future. Things like a github account that only admins have access, or another solution to that, but some place where the code and the backup (S3 for example) could be safe, and are easily shared among any other new admin.

So... is there anything happening? Any concrete plans?
Frankly I cannot be of any help with hosting or saving the challenges. I could throw you some bucks, though...

Hello ,

I am moved and delighted to find that so many of you are still active and care for this website!
It played a huge part in my live for many years, and that was mostly because of you - this wonderful community of amazing people.
Thank you all very much!

There are many things I have to consider right now, so just a few quick comments:
Who knows? I might be alive, or I might be speaking to you from the other side...
Our host informed us that it is a standard procedure according to the Expired Registration Recovery Policy, and the domain registration will be extended automatically by them. Certainly rest assured that the site is not going down anytime soon.
I just secured full backups of the site (all files and databases). There is no need for copies like that. We are thinking about hosting the site elsewhere with access to more developers, but even at our current host, the contract is not running out and bright-shadows.net will continue to be accessible.

Cheers,
Erik