SteelNavy is completely separate from the website that hosts the message board. That is boardhost.com and if you remember the adds re-appearing annually, that was because Steve needed to pay a fee to keep the board ad free.

As I said in my technical non-answer, the issue that everyone is seeing is that "SteelNavy.net" can't be found. That is a DNS issue. DNS (Domain Name System) points a name at an internet IP address (Similar to the way that "The White House" translates to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). DNS is usually handled by a registrar such as GoDaddy, but if I do a WHOIS on "SteelNavy.net" I see that the domain is registered and paid up through January of 2025:

Domain Information

Name
STEELNAVY.NET
Registry Domain ID
1696174233_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
Registered On
2012-01-09T18:09:02Z
Expires On
2025-01-09T18:09:02Z
Updated On
2024-11-19T12:32:18Z
Domain Status
clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited

Name Servers
NS1.TURBIFY.COM

NS2.TURBIFY.COM

Registrar Information

Name
Tucows Domains Inc.
Registrar WHOIS Server
whois.tucows.com
Registrar URL
http://www.tucows.com


The "Name Servers" are Turbify, which is a web hosting company that spun out of Yahoo web hosting, which I seem to recall Steve used to use. That name server should respond with an IP address when queried, an example would be me querying google's name server about my ResearcherAtLarge site:

nslookup researcheratlarge.com 8.8.8.8
Server: dns.google
Address: 8.8.8.8

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: researcheratlarge.com
Address: 23.229.205.230

First command is "NameServer Lookup" and then I tell it the domain to look up, and then the DNS server to use.

It looks to me like they have set up their name servers to ignore queries for domains they don't handle, as I get a "query refused" when I try and look up my site through their name servers:

nslookup researcheratlarge.com NS1.TURBIFY.COM
Server: UnKnown
Address: 34.195.51.6

*** UnKnown can't find researcheratlarge.com: Query refused

So, I wasn't able to find any other list of Turbify customers and can't use that to verify 100% that it's not simply a problem with a Turbify system. It might be a technical glitch on their end, but given the length of time this has been going on, I doubt it. The NSlookup query for SteelNavy.net essentially says that it failed:

nslookup steelnavy.net NS1.TURBIFY.COM
Server: UnKnown
Address: 34.195.51.6


*** UnKnown can't find steelnavy.net: Server failed

nslookup steelnavy.net NS2.TURBIFY.COM
Server: UnKnown
Address: 52.3.46.62

*** UnKnown can't find steelnavy.net: Server failed

I've been involved with web sites for over 25 years, and I'd be happy to be wrong about this, but in my experience, when a major company refuses DNS queries like this for more than a few hours, it's not a technical issue. At that point the second most likely cause of an outage is a payment issue.

But like I said, I'd be happy to be wrong.