There is a way forward! (Update at 24-09)
Although we never had access to any of the main Apollo servers or the domain, one of our staff had access to the IRC server. While browsing this server out of curiosity (Athena was bored), we stumbled upon a full site backup that was taken in June 2017. That is a long time ago, but we estimate that this backup still contains about 70% of all current torrents, and about 80% of all current users. We have secured this backup, and have confirmed that it is intact.
With this backup, it will be possible to revive a large part of the site with relative ease. Our current plan is to start from scratch, and to use this old database to regain the userbase and torrents. If you were a member of Apollo as of mid-june 2017, you will be able to receive an invite to Orpheus on the email address you used for Apollo. We will publish the details when the site launches. Stats (buffer, amount of uploads, notifications, ...) will be transferred to Orpheus as well.
Many people acquired huge amounts of buffer during the initial global freeleech and this created serious distortion in the economy. This will be redressed after we have crunched the numbers. While some people will lose varying amounts of buffer, they will still be in a comfortable position to participate in the economy.
If you signed up to Orpheus later, we will provide other options which to allow you to receive an account. You will need your original invitation email (if the email server was working at the time) or a screen shot of your profile page.
There will be no open signups.
The new site will start without any torrents, but as soon as you begin to seed your Apollo torrents on the new tracker, torrents that appear in the 2017 database will automatically be added to the site. This way, there will no dead torrents from the old site. We are developing a GUI tool that will work on all operating systems and with most popular clients, to mass-change all Apollo tracker URLs to Orpheus tracker URLs. A CLI tool for seedboxes and servers will also be provided.
We still hope that the original sysops will make the final database dump available to us. If that happens, we will replace the 2017 database with the newer one, allowing more members to join easily and more torrents to be rescued.
The ETA for getting the site up from this point is 2 weeks. We realize that this is a week longer than originally planned, but a lot of code needs to be written and tested in order to ensure a smooth transition.
