Apparently you're now supposed to discuss issues and new features in a special IRC channel.

Source: http://laravel.com/docs/contributions#new-features

Now that's controversial... =)

Uhhh, so how are we supposed to look for existing issues, search the IRC logs :(

There's also a load of dialog and valuable info lost from all the git issues. They could have at least left them there and just disabled creating new issues or something. That's really disappointing.

I found this: http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2fx0sz/laravel_removing_github_issues_opting_for_failing/

Bit more discussion on the matter.

Just to be clear, this asking for them to be left but read-only, is a complete pipe dream. Github does not offer that. You either have issues or you don't. No choice about it. At least for now if you come across an issue in Google's search you can see the cached copy of the page. But I'm not sure how long the cached copies last.

However, this whole situation brings up one good point... Backups. Don't rely on information being in one place forever. When you find a good piece of information, post it somewhere else. Contribute it back into the docs. Do something to get the information you find useful somewhere else (preferably where others can see it as well.) This will allow for some resiliency for things like this.