Anomalies.Net 404?

[American Patriot]

BTW the data would be residing on the servers out there in CA until such time as they delete the server drives. I believe the machine was a virtual machine riding on some rack someplace in some ISP - but I'm not remembering any details on it.

[New Guy]

odds are it is all gone if it was a paid hosting thing. one can always hope though. hope olav is ok.

[American Patriot]

They are not in the same town. Apparently there is no current contact either. Darby is on and off the site here so he can verify this if he likes.

Last I heard Olav had not responded to him - and still has not responded to me, either home, work email addresses, PMs or any of the other methods I've tried to reach him.

[American Patriot]

Apparently Olav brought Anomalies back online. After the John Titor quote in my Survival Quotes thread I thought I would check and sure enough, Anomalies is back up.

I guess Olav got my mail and messages after all because it appears to have come back up right after he friended me on Facebook.

[American Patriot]

The FORUM however, is NOT there.

[New Guy]

yep, some pages work and some others aren't working still. no forums.

[DarbyII]

Sorry that I haven't kept this thread updated but here goes:

As you already know, the Anomalies forum was down from June until some time in October. I attempted at least a dozen times to get Olav's attention to no avail other than quick one-liner emails from him stating that he was very busy. In October he finally contacted me. He told me that he has abandoned the BBS forum entirely, was installing new web software and turning it into a UFO/Conspiracy website with no forum. And that is what was done.

I checked today and the site is entirely down...again. Since he put up the current site nothing has changed relative to keeping it online for more than a few days at a time. Bottom line is that for over a year the site has been down much more than it has been up, it's viewership (not counting indexing bots for Google, Yahoo, etc.) is virtually zero. That also impacts the site's Roku link. Olav had it set up with a Roku link but if the site is down there's no Roku link.

The site is done for - RIP.

For me the really gawling thing is that once Rick came over here I was responsible for the day-to-day supervision of the site and communication with Olav for five+ years. Once he made up his mind about what to do with Anomalies (which appears to have occurred back in April or May 2012) he never had the decency of giving me a clue, thanking me for my time or anything else along those lines. I didn't own or have any proprietary interest in Anomalies but I did have several thousand man-hours invested as a Mod and Admin over the course of 10+ years. It was annoying. Water under the bridge with no one really hurt, but annoying nonetheless.

And now...back to World of Tanks.

[Phil Fiord]

I will say thank you Darby. Truly. While I was not an owner when the site went to the bad format I stopped going there at all. Seeing a 2 inch sidebar like site with a nearly blank left side it was a stupid looking site for leaving it neglected for format.

Anyway, I would like much of the forum archived. Especially the political and TT ones. There was much info there over the years that is worth keeping.

So, with that said I hope to see you here more often.

[Ryan Ruck]

Anyway, I would like much of the forum archived. Especially the political and TT ones. There was much info there over the years that is worth keeping.

This was going to be my question.

If cost and effort of hosting the site are an issue, is there a reason that Olav hasn't decided to relocate to a hosting solution like GoDaddy? I can tell you from first hand experience that the back-end of stuff here is pretty hands off and we have very good uptime. The cost for the bandwidth (unlimited) is pretty good. The only thing I can see being a hangup is the storage space requirements but, even if you step up in server space, the annual cost is still pretty low.

With the board, he can simply close down registration and posting functions while leaving all the data intact for reading.

I know many of us had many man-hours invested in posting and research there and would not like to see that data disappear into the ether.

Also, as far as I know, Olav still has an account here so if he'd like to chime in here and let us know what the plans are he is more than free.

[American Patriot]

Darby, *I* will say thank you. It is sad to see the site gone and Olav made various claims about being "an Archivist" more than anything; that's one of the reasons he asked me to handle the forums. I was experienced with BBSes and email lists and dealing with day-to-day nonsense. Once he laid out rules and we determined where we wanted to go I took off with it.

Yeah... thousands of man hours for each of us individually and collectively, down the tubes. So much for "being an archivist".

I'm with Phil. I think it should at lease be archived someplace so we could look things up.

Olav has been involved in movie making or something and like Darby, I got nothing more than a short response from him claiming he was busy, if I got anything at all. The last few attempts garnered me exactly no response at all, thus I gave up.

Darby, I know I speak for everyone here when I say you are welcome to stay here and contribute when you can, where you can. I know you are good at taking apart conspiracies and getting to the bottom of a story.

Please hang around here from time to time if you can. I know *I* would appreciate it and I'm not sure how much longer I'll be on the site.

Best wishes

[DarbyII]

Rick & Phil,

Thank you for the thank yous...errrr... That's a mouthful but you know what I mean.

Yep - the archive is important. As much as a pain in the ass Titor is those threads have been important for me to catch noobs up with background rather than me making editorial comments that are opinion rather than fact (fact as to what was written back then). I've posted the original Titor threads, in full and unedited, on Time Travel Institute. It doesn't include the thousands of posts and dozens of threads related to the original but at least that much is safe for now. They are also archived in 4 HDD's at home - three of which are sitting in a cabinet outside a PC box. It would be nice if Olav offered the Anomalies forum archive for a BBS to archive. In the case of the Old Forum/Mission Enterprize (Marz Barz) archive it would be an archive of an archive...yet another mouthful.

Sites go down, disappear and, even though it's just the Internet, there is information lost.

[Phil Fiord]

I would not mind if we agreed here to host a link onsite to an archive of closed boards with full credit to AN and Olav with perhaps an overview of what AN was.

[American Patriot]

That's a great idea! hahaha.

Wonder what Olav would think?

[Ryan Ruck]

I'm not opposed to us hosting an archived AN but... the database space we have for our account would not be enough space to host both TAA and an AN archive. That isn't to say we couldn't set up a new account to host it but there's not enough space as is.

The other thing is that a lot of the links both on the board and internally in the board software would point to the AN domain that Olav would still have. If, however, the UBB software is anything like the vBulletin software, there is a way to change the domain the board software uses.

[American Patriot]

I wish there were a way just to collect the actual forums into some kind of a searchable database.

[Phil Fiord]

Recall that in the heyday of Titor, an enterprising (not Enterprise Mission) member of AN setup www.johntitor.co.uk. It was an archive of the original P2P posts fully formatted. As it is essentially text based and then represented in a format, I doubt it would be a ton of data save for pictures and other attachments. Such attachments could be hosted on a free imgur.com account for example.

[American Patriot]

well...

it's back

http://www.theanomalieschannel.com/

[Phil Fiord]

No forum that I saw though.

[American Patriot]

No, the forum is gone. It won't be back.

It's too much work to maintain, especially when you have a lot of kooks coming in reposting and rehashing the same crap and conspiracy theories AND you have no one who moderates it.

Olav will NEVER moderate it.

[Toad]

A shame. For me those old Titor threads were fun to go through.