Whats with the site downtime?
 

The site seems to be crashing more lately...
This week it was down for three days consecutively.

Whats going on?

I'm not usually one to bother with stuff like this, but it may be useful for whoever manages the site to give some details, and see if there's a way to get help maintaining the site. Sometimes the forums are less active, but they still house a huge library of information on our platform, down to just about anything people do with these cars. Plus, I think some of us still use this forum as a way to make and communicate with friends.

I would hope we can find a way to improve things! :)

Admin be like, it's back now, move along.

@Hachiroku

Yep. People need to chill on this. Not like a couple of days of downtime is life altering.


https://thumbs.gfycat.com/RingedHeav...clam-small.gif

Ive been on forums that shuttered without warning. Hell I was a moderator on one of them.

I just want to make sure I grab my build thread history before it goes, if its going.

Ya both the DSM and Evo forums I was on just disappeared one day and never came back. Pretty normal for any non commercial site I am afraid.

Yep, these sites aren't free to host, and ads don't always pay the bills, or the original owner/sponsor moves on. I've had that happen to many over the years.

It was much more common in the BBS days for popular boards to just go away, when stuff was run on private servers and such. Once I ran a BBS for a while that I was a member of after the host passed away. Basically I helped the family do an elegant shutdown of it rather than just turning off the power. It just so happened I know the "owner" and his family.

Amazingly even after 10yrs, this forum is still owned by same person. Few forum I've been, it went through 3 different owners. After the 3rd one, site went down in a yr.

Eh, I'd say some concern is reasonable, especially after what you and @Dadhawk have said.

We don't know this forum won't just have downtime one of these days and not come back at all.

It'd just be good to know if we could help in some way or at least know in advance that it might not come back.

Some guys on the FT86 discord we’re playing with the idea of scraping the whole site periodically so that if/when it ever disappears we can preserve the information for the next forum.

If we knew who owner was we could ask them about just taking a snapshot/backup of (what I assume is) their SQL database that backs the forums.

That'd be easiest.

Scraping works too, but unless there's a specific tool out for vBulletin forums to make it super easy, then it'll be a pain in the ass to script it.

If it does there is precious little we can do. It is hard to remember that for the 20,000 or so members this place has had it all goes back to existing on the whim of one (maybe two) people. I watched the lancer/Evo forum I was on die a slow agonizing death as the owner lost interest and tried to turn it into a money maker by selling more and more advertising. By the end it took almost 5 minutes of closing pop up and wading through ads just to make one post. There is precious little that members can do to save it if it goes. If they decide to pack it in for any reason it just goes away and we have to find a new place to hang out. Maybe a nice knitting or quilting forum for a change of pace.


Really think that is all irrelevant in this case though as the down time was just a couple of technical or administrative glitches not the death knell of fading forum. People are acting like this is a frequent and regular occurrence when really it isn't either. It is probably more just coincidence it happened twice in quick succession so the panic is unwarranted.

STOP BEING REASONABLE, WE’RE TRYING TO FREAK OUT HERE!