VI, it was ineffective purely because I care more about the community than whether or not Zee saw what we did. The original intention was just to leave it, for Zee to see and change back to normal. For him to notice, it would've had to have been closed for much longer than a few hours: however I'd rather have the community here than stop all movement just for his sake.

With regards to other responses, it's good to see a generally positive outlook from people. However, it has all been said before with nothing ever acted upon. I'm guilty of that, you're guilty of that. It's fine saying something like, "well who cares if he's not here, we as a community can make it what we want" (along the lines of "while the cat is away, the mice will play") but the fact is we haven't. That's still an opportunity for us, if we choose to take it.

With regards to why Zee not being here is an issue, for me at least, here goes. The ads here won't be making much revenue (almost certainly not enough to pay for a dedicated server) and the owner clearly doesn't want to have any direct involvement with the site. Those things lead me to believe, pessimistic as it may be, that at any moment he really might just give it up as a lost cause—wasted CPU cycles—and just shut the doors. There's nothing that leads me to conclude that he'll forever keep the server running just for fun or just "because it's there" other than pure optimism.