LiceBase will be retired starting 5.1.2025

LiceBase has been in continous operation since 2016. Unfortunetely, I have to retire LiceBase on January 5. 2025 due to technical and security reasons.
On that date, the current service will be retired and the URL licebase.org will become inaccessible. See below for a more detailed explanation.
I am working on the new version likely called LiceBase2 to be available at the same URL which is going to replace LiceBase and will be released in early 2025. However, a downtime will be inevitable.
Unfortunately, I am unable to estimate the exact duration of the downtime at the current point in time but I expect it to last at least two months.
This decision and the chain of coming events regarding the service is final. On behalf of the Sea Lice Research Centre and ELIXIR Norway we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this.

Explanation of reasons

LiceBase is based on the content management framework Drupal 7 and the extension module Tripal for managing and displaying genomics data. After several prolongations, Drupal 7 will reach its End Of Life (EOL) on January 5., 2025. After this date, there will be now more updates for the Drupal 7 core, and therefore operating a web-site securely based on the current system would be impossible. Unfortunately, the Tripal project has not delivered a stable release version and is unlikely to do so in time for the EOL date of Drupal 7. The current alpha version of Tripal 4 is too unstable and is lacking some essential functionality, such as searching for genes and displaying gene sequences, to provide a viable update path for us at the moment. We are still working on a preliminary solution based on Tripal 4 but there is likely going to be a significant loss of functionality on the new site at first.
All experimental annotation and meta-data will remain safely stored in the database system of LiceBase but might not be accessible immediately in a first-release candidate of LiceBase2.

Many sites operating Drupal/Tripal are facing similar prospects. LiceBase has joined the GenoRing consortium and is collaborating with ELIXIR and ENA to secure funding and continuous operation of important organism databases.

Moving forward with LiceBase 2

With the implementation of the next version of LiceBase, we will move to a new cloud-based hosting solution for our services. This should increase the overall performance and reliability of the service.
In connection with the update we are planning to make the following changes:

• We will add additional sea lice genomes that have become available recently
• An update of the Atlantic salmon louse assembly and annotation is likely to be hosted on LiceBase first
• We are likely going to cease Feide authentication for a more general OpenID-based authentication. Most users will not need to register for an account to use the site.