We're Back !?!?!?!?

[Obsessive]

Originally Posted by marsean

Holy jaysus....now that is funny...I think admin is taking a screwing by whoever is working IT for them...How many times is this gonna repeat? I sure hate to think about this going up in smoke over a burnt power cord...

I don't think the owner has an IT staff. I've seen even the worst development team or persons do a better job at keeping a site up. I don't think the owner is even aware there are free services that check uptime of a site every few minutes & send email/SMS alerts to notify. I think the owner is also afraid to work with anyone legitimate to re-develop the site because there's either not enough money to do so or he only trusts himself with the information in the database or both. This is not a complicated site. I think what brings it down is competing sites who are either crawling it to scrape off it or hitting it with a DDOS. Both can be mitigated by a proper firewall, access throttling or using a proxy CDN like CloudFlare - but the owner may not be aware of those options or does't want to use those options out of privacy concerns. Yet the server for this site is hosted on AWS last I checked so that must not be it.

I've concluded that the real problem of why this site often goes down for multiple hours or often slows to a crawl is that the owner is the sole person operating the site, has no IT team, and doesn't have the knowledge to continue operating the site properly on his own. He is confronted with a lack of ability and lack of resources or trust. Which means at some point, sooner or later, the owner will be confronted with a problem that he will not be able to resolve and it will most likely be unrecoverable even if he did want to pay for the resources to have someone handle it.

[chanceforester]

Originally Posted by Obsessive

. Which means at some point, sooner or later, the owner will be confronted with a problem that he will not be able to resolve and it will most likely be unrecoverable even if he did want to pay for the resources to have someone handle it.

For whom the bell tolls....Well, it was fun while it lasted....every site I've ever been on has morphed or changed or basically ended. Except Parlor....he seems to be kickin it ok....

[RoyalCrown]

Whenever I click on the site and login successfully I've feel like I've won the lotto!

[NicetoKnow]

Originally Posted by chanceforester

...If it weren't for the camaraderie on the discussion boards, I would go back to hunting and gathering like I used to - not even using the internet. ...Like I said, if it weren't for the interesting discussion boards I would Ichi.

Yep! (But, I have dropped off my activity markedly.)

[8934217892008]

At this point, with all the downtime and people saying they've paid for VIP access and not getting it, its difficult to justify paying for a membership. Especially since a year later, there's still very few reviews for the cities I monger in.

[NicetoKnow]

Just a thought... Suggestion to ADMIN.

When you are ready to re-launch the website...open it up to a free 30-45 days. Standard Registration & Login required. It might give incentive to re-establish the site.

Deep down, this is still my favorite site. Assuming the REVIEW portion ever gets retooled, and the FORUM generally remains unchanged...I would be glad to offer more again. IMO

[RoyalCrown]

Can't log in to see reviews, but can log in to see forum. STRANGE!

[SSP]

Unbelievable

[Richard Boinkwell]

I cannot log in. I cannot contact them because the "captcha image" I am supposed to type in to verify shows nothing.

[8934217892008]

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Looks like a drive space issue.