I think you should change the title saying
"All domains are back online! "

Mine has been offline again for 9 hours.
This has been going on for over a week now.

Quote:

It is a site created by the authors of one of the greatest Italian web communities Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum! (more then 70000 users, around 2 million pages seen monthly, and over 100 staff members)

You should change this to say:

Quote:

With only one member of staff who is actually capable of fixing problems (raulken), and a customer service team who are not even able to contact him

I'm afaraid they are not back online. That lasted only a day.

Is this how it's going to be? I wonder.

This is not the first time the forums have gone offline, there were quite a few problems round the year too.

You know, it's not that we will go online again eventually because I suppose we will. It's that the communication gets cut off, it's that people reading the forum or memebers don't trust it to join or to post, it's that it seems unreliable to really "put your soul in it".

Really, how can one person alone be responsible and capable of running a whole network when so many problems are involved (they ARE machines) and things to attend to?

Firemen also need a brake but they have others standing by. And they don't get paid either.

The whole thing saddens me and must say I feel very dissappointed.

So, no staff news for well over 24 hours? It's all gone very quiet.

I can hear the death toll ringing for my forum. I think I can safely assume that my members are absolutely sick of me telling them it's up, only for it to go down again soon after. I don't think they will trust me any more so I will not contact them for a while.

I know there is no point in posting any of this, as it will not make any difference, but I am actually very upset and quite depressed about the whole thing.

It was going so well to start. I was getting 5 new members a day and I was being congratulated by people all over New Zealand (a small country) for being the first to start a forum on my subject and actually making a diffrence in the music scene here, then bang! goodbye forum, goodbye new friends.

I will at some point start my own forum on a proper service provider that I will pay for. One were there is some kind of prompt effective problem resolution when it's needed.

At least from my experiences I have learnt that this is something that I really enjoy and want to do.

I would like to know if there will be any way I can copy my existing posts, member accounts etc to my new one?

My sincere apologies for the delay of apropriate information, and with the "sign" on the index. I did actually go to bed last night under the impression that everything was up and running.

I can fully understand your disappointment and frustration.

This is perhaps not the time to argue against it, but let me share a few facts and thoughts, in no particular order:

I am Admin of several domains on the affected server, and I also have my own forum on one of the domains, and I can honestly say that this particular server has had very little downtime and problems for the better part of the year.

Meanwhile, a couple of the other servers have had their problems.

I dare to say that, all in all, we do not have more problems than other free forum communities of comparable size.

ForumUp has an honest policy, also when it comes to problems.

This is how you came to know that Raulken is the lone Webmaster at the moment (since several months), and that there might be problems with getting the messages through to him; i.e. that we have sent messages, through all available channels, without reply from him since right before Christmas.

This is also how you know that the members of the Support Staff know as little as you know, about the actual cause of the problem.

I have nevertheless drawn from my experience, and from my knowledge in these matters, to give you my honest opinion about plausible reasons and scenarios. Not in any kind of misguided attempt to "decieve" you, but in the hope that it should prevent you from worrying more than "necessary", and/or from worrying about the wrong things.

Most of the members in the Support Staff have their own forums on ForumUp, and we are all volunteers. This does not it any sense lessen our responsibilities towards you, or towards ForumUp and Raulken. But it does, in my experience -- as a Staff member now, and as a forum owner before that -- mean that we tend to treat other forum owners as fellow members, and as friends, rather than as customers. Often for the better, and sometimes for the worse...

r0b0c0p wrote:

I will at some point start my own forum on a proper service provider that I will pay for. One were there is some kind of prompt effective problem resolution when it's needed.

I honestly think you should do that in the future, and I wish you all the luck with it. However, let me give you a couple of warnings of sorts:

The server "farm" (as Margaret called it) that ForumUp uses is in every sense a proper service (and server) provider. At this point we do not know if the problem is with their server hardware and/or with their connections, or with ForumUp's software. There are several signs of the former, such as the fact that the forums are unaffected by Debug Modes and similar, but I will not speculate further about that...

My point is that elusive and prolonged problems of this kind can happen to any service on the internet, including the really big ones, despite their resources. In the past I have seen both MSN and Yahoo struggle with problems for weeks, and I have seen big company and institutional sites being offline, because of (server and/or software) problems, for long periods of time as well.

To run your own forum, on its own server, means that it will be you who's got to deal with any and all MySQL and Debug Mode errors, and everything else that can -- and eventually will --happen. For periods of time you will be the Webmaster, and nothing but the Webmaster, with little or no time for posting and taking part in the discussions and fun. This is a main reason that I prefer to use a service of this kind...

Quote:

I would like to know if there will be any way I can copy my existing posts, member accounts etc to my new one?

There is the Back-Up feature, but it can only be used when the forum is online.

You will find information in this thread, and in posts linked to from there:

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

And please note what Raulken says here:

Raulken wrote:

payment are the little problems, see here for tech require for import mysql db: Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

FoxLeonard

And our forums are still down!!!

I have just communicated live with Raulken. He has been working on the problem, but it is not yet fixed. The problem is with the Apache server software.

[Note that the US defense department is not at all involved. While the US defense department was involved in the begining development of the internet, (not the full design of the present day internet) they do not maintain and control the entire world wide web and all the nodes/servers! The military does not use the same protocols as the general public. So public parts of the internet can indeed have problems and not work, that are not where military communications travel through.]

Raulken is searching for another person to help with the technical needs of ForumUp. Hopefully soon it won't be only Raulken doing everything by himself. And, hopefully soon the server software problem will be fixed.

NO DATA IS LOST OR WILL BE LOST!

To clarify, it is the Apache server processing that is out- what lets the data get out and into the world. It is NOT a problem with the software for the forums themselves. All the forums and all their data are fine and not affected. They are just "trapped" inside the server, not being able to get out due to the server's processing problem with it's software.

I suppose one could think of it as if the key to door doesn't always work to open the lock to let the data get outside.

We understand the great frustration and are so very sorry this has happened.

Thanks for the information. And thanks for being honest, I apreciate that the staff are doing everything that they are capable of. It's good to know that the cause has been discovered.

I do think that raulken should revise what it says on the intro screen of

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Quote:

It is a site created by the authors of one of the greatest Italian web communities Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum! (more then 70000 users, around 2 million pages seen monthly, and over 100 staff members)

Like many other people I'm sure, I signed up here after being impressed at those comments. I realise (now) that these claims do not refer directly to

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

And because of this I think they are misleading.

You beat me to it again, Perry...

Jokes aside, the forums have been up and seemingly stable for a few hours, but there is still no word from Raulken that the problem is actually fixed and gone for good...

This may be another test run.

Hence my reluctance to make an announcement just yet.

Last but not least, thanks for the heads-up!

FoxLeonard

.nz was working but is now timing-out again.

.ca and .lv are still offline.

This is starting to be very annoying... .gr is down once more!!

This is now beyond a joke.... .za is still offline Saturday 29/12

nz is working again, i'm sure it will go down again soon.....