VPForums is down

[TAB]

Now it seams much problems. The last weeks the Forums was only for 2 hours down but now nothing goes on.
Has someone some infos.

 

[scapino]

Have you noticed that Future Pinball forums is down as well?

Thats what happens when it goes down on a Friday night....stays dead for the whole weekend untill someone comes in Monday and kicks the server in the butt..... :)

Kurt

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i'm missing my cheap online social replacement fix.

 

[TedB]

Indeed this break takes a long time, but the nirvana forums seems like a nice replacement for the time being.

 

[karetag]

I've been out the pinball emulation scene for quite a while. (got married) Came back to check things out. (Recently sepearted). Thank God you guys are saying they are just down. I thought both sites were bought/sold, or no longer in service permanently. I was about to do an entire back-up of all the pinball stuff I downloaded over the years. eh, maybe I should still do it, anyone no how to get CD ROM drivers to work with Vista?

 

[TAB]

Have you noticed that Future Pinball forums is down as well?

Thats what happens when it goes down on a Friday night....stays dead for the whole weekend untill someone comes in Monday and kicks the server in the butt..... :)

Kurt

I help you kicking

 

[inkochnito]

It seems there are more sites with problems.
I've got this message from Statcounter.com

Dear Members,

Due to an outage at The Planet (data center) several of our servers are down and service is limited.

I hope this will be resolved soon.

Peter

 

[sleepy]

Well, you know I thought clearing my cache fixed the problem. Worked really good afterwards.
Maybe it WAS a coincidence.

But shit! There was a fire at The Planet in Texas on Saturday.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/01/the_planet_houston_data_center_fire/

Then I wake up to the smell of burning plastic resins and find out Universal Studios is on fire 7 miles from where I live.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7430048.stm

What A PILE OF LUCK!

 

[sleepy]

So I tune to the NBC Raw News subchannel to follow the Universal fire.
NBC and Universal share offices on Universal Hill and are owned by General Electric...they're running ABS and keyboard infomercials instead of the news.

Ain't corporate television sick?

 

[bob]

To Pinball Nirvana!!

Seriously, this is the greatest Visual Pinball site! Jon will do just about anything for the community. He hosts this place, IRPinball and Pinball Originals and most VPM tables are uploaded here first and then added to VPF later.

I uploaded my new Spider-man table here last night when I saw VPF was down....

 

[computerfrk1]

To Pinball Nirvana!!

Seriously, this is the greatest Visual Pinball site! Jon will do just about anything for the community. He hosts this place, IRPinball and Pinball Originals and most VPM tables are uploaded here first and then added to VPF later.

I uploaded my new Spider-man table here last night when I saw VPF was down....

We are still up at PU.net not much to discuss about at the moment but someone could strike up a friendly conversation there.

 

[Joe]

We are still up at PU.net not much to discuss about at the moment but someone could strike up a friendly conversation there.

this site and http://www.pinball-originals.com seem to be slow as well.

 

[shiva]

Was wondering what happened, as I go to a lot of sites, a few are down. The Planet is the big boy of server hosts, and quite a few "hosting" companies use them.

 

[sleepy]

Here's a link to The Planet's forum explaining the situation with regular updates. Page 2 near the bottom of the page gets to the extent of the damage:

http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185&st=0

 

[TAB]

Now VPF is online again :)

 

[Phoenixx]

Considering how full-featured AND well-maintained this forum is i really cannot understand why everyone seems to be preferring the totally outdated and neglected-by-its-owner VPF forum anyway. Sure, it is great that the place is being kept online at all etc., but nevertheless, from a pure technical POV it just sucks, simply because it still runs on ancient forumsoft which lacks even the most basic enhanced functions of forumsoft of today, you know, such as making a word or sentence bold or italic or underlined etcetera just by highlighting it and clicking the respective button at the top. (And thats only one example.)

And knowing the place and how it is run for several years i think it is pretty safe to say that this is not going to ever change anymore either. On the contrary, it will most certainly stay that way until the place is eventually going offline for good, (whenever that may be, but as it looks right now it might be sooner than we think), so, in a manner of speaking, what you see there today is precisely what you will ever be getting. So why not change to something better if the option is there?

PinballNirvana has all the recent forum functions and TONS of other stuff more, and most importantly, its owner is always there AND willing to make changes according to user wishes or simply because something has become necessairy. Unlike VPF the place is as well maintained as a forum can be, and if there are any problems John simply calls in his specialist who takes care of them right away. I witnessed it myself some time ago when there was that problem with the AutoLogin; a couple of days and everything has been fixed. And what more could a community wish for? VFP on the other hand is stuck in the past and it will no doubt be staying there forever, so me for one i really think it would be a smart move to make PN the official 'main-hub' of this community. The sooner the better,...

(And to be totally honest; i have to admit that i have caught myself more than just once wishing that VPF would close its doors for good so that everyone would quasi be 'forced' to take their business here. Because in my opinion this is simply the better place. And if the look of the place is the only thing that holds people back from changing over here; im sure John could and would alter its appearance to make it look more like VPF, which, by the way, would be a good idea especially regarding the frontpage anyway, which should have a 'ActiveThreads' list similar to that at VPF, meaning it should not display only five or so active threads on a blank background, but instead 20 or 30 and arranged in a 'list-box' like at VPFs frontpage. This just looks better and people used to the look of VFPs frontpage would be feeling more 'at home' with this look too,...)

In any event, thanks John for keeping this place in such excellent shape,...i can only hope that eventually everyone will come here so PN will be what VPF is today, user and visitor-wise,...

 

[destruk]

Phoenix, probably the reason is habit. Also, when vpforums is up, the pages are tossed up within a couple of seconds of clicking a link or reply button. VpForums does have slightly more server/bandwidth capability than any of the other vp or future pinball distribution sites as far as I can tell. Pinball Nirvana is a great backup for when the other sites are inaccessible, just I don't like having to log in every time I come here - some kind of cookie problem with my computers, also clicking on the java reply box forced my browser back a page when I pressed the delete key on the keyboard, and the pages generally load quite slowly here for me.

New software or not, I prefer as fast as possible, so I deal with the frustration at vpforums. And I deal with the frustration here with slow page loads, hard to navigate download sections requiring 3-4 page loads to get to where you want, etc etc etc All sites serve some purpose - flaming one into oblivion seems rather stupid. :)

 

[destruk]

well, you need to click the "quick reply" button in one of the replies in the thread first before the quick reply box is activated. That IMO is one extra click nobody should have to do, and 10 seconds to post a reply is slow too. btw - I can't get to vpforums right now either, haha...

Thanks JPH for keeping this site up.

 

[destruk]

vpforums is back up again - with a total of 6 users online on the list - so it just came back again.

 

[TedB]

I agree with Destruk, although this forum is a great forum vpforum feels more like 'home'. Also whenever vpforums are up, it is a bit snappier than pinballnirvana.

That said. This is a great site when vpforums is down, when I want to play a flash game, for downloading, some discussions etc. I am a supporting member for vpforums, but I guess Jon deserves it as much (or even more) so a donation is on its way.

 

[Phoenixx]

I dont know, to me personally it doesnt seem like this place would be slower or less responsive than VPF. It used to be, once, but that is long ago, and now i can really not see any significant difference anymore.

Granted, due to its 'modernness' PN may have to load somewhat larger scripts and stuff, so if thats really the case then it may in deed take a splitsecond longer to build up a page. But then that would be to expect; one forum is old and doesnt have a lot of functions yet whereas the other forum is new and does have a lot of functions, which of course must be loaded along.

But with the speed of the internet of today this is all covered tenfold, so even if there is a little more data to load on PN compared to VPF then this is still not generating enough load that it could become a noticable issue. On the contrary, for a site not to load in an instant these days there had to be much more bandwidth-draining stuff on a page than is the case with both PNs and VPFs pages,...like i said, i myself can not see any significant difference at all as the pages of both forums are loading virtually instantanously for me. And i still have only DSL3000 myself i might add, so as long as someone doesnt still have dial-up, (or some general problem with their line like poor signal quality due to being located too far away from the local distribution node), there should not be any noticable difference between PN/VPF for them either.

In any case i dont think it can really be an issue of more bandwidth vs. less bandwidth, because if PN would really provide significantly less overall bandwidth than VPF then i would have to be noticing a significant difference in responsiveness myself as well. But i cant say that i do, and compared to most other people here im even rather far away from the server; all across the ocean in Germany/Europe,...

 

[shiva]

Appears to be down... again

The only thing is it's amazing that site has stayed in one piece for so long

 

[JonPurpleHaze]

Just wanted to mention a few things about the site and Thanks for the support!

A planned upgrade that was supposed to happen almost a month ago never occurred (life got in the way) but it should happen soon. The upgrade will affect the speed for the better but there are a lot of variables involved, User Information (in a database) is currently shared between the main site (PostNuke) and these relatively new forums (VBulletin).

Phoenixx is correct, these forums will never be as fast as VPF, updated software is essential for security and these forums currently require a lot more server resources than an outdated VBulletin.

VPF is very important and shouldn't be replaced, this site was born to offer Flipperless VP Tables and has evolved, VPF has also,.. but after all these years, they still have zero non-vpm tables. As most of you know, my passion is all about VP Table availability and i know VPF has been has been a downright failure in this crucial function. My passion for VPF runs deep and I've offered to try and upgrade it (last offer was last month), but AJ rarely relys to email or PM's and that's my biggest problem, I receive a bunch of email and PM's from folks that want to know how to get it running..

The quick reply problem (just an option) has been changed and you don't need to click on a post anymore, I'll have to give this more evaluation (what do you prefer?) because it won't quote anything, anymore..

Jon
PS: Thank You bob and TedB for the donations, this will help to pay for server costs and site Upgrades!