Thanks for everything you do Robin !
Can’t live without Pinside in my life.
Wow... what a long week it was!

As someone who develops and hosts realtime enterprise grade services that must live in azure... i wish i could say they are more reliable. They roll maintenance disruptions with short notice all the effing time. Percentage wise they are fine... but i have at least one or two customer impacts a month due to a host unexpectedly dropping out.

The azure AD/login outtages lately were big ones too.

Hush and get back to working on the CFTBL hologram replacement.

Just kidding ; ).

This post alone makes me wish advertising that putting some on ignore is not against the rules.

Like you could not sell the same game 5 to 6 days later.

If anything, your apparent inability to sell your games without Pinside demonstrates why WE should donate.

Sheer audacity, man.....

Kind of confusing. Seller couldn't PM his potential customers. But they couldn't PM him either. They must have figured out what the issue was. Neither party was ignoring each other on purpose.

Hard to lose a sale or buy a game when contact isn't possible.

Really interested parties would try again once Pinside was back up.

LTG : )

I didn't lose a sale during the outage...I completed one. Anybody that hadn't traded contact info by the time of the outage wasn't a serious buyer (yet), so you're right back where you started when the site came back up.

At a former job, the data center had nitrogen and water. They tested the plumbing one day and we found a giant puddle about 1 ft. away from a very critical server. A pipe leaked. Shit happens...

Good to see the only website that matters is back. Ok, there are a couple others too.

Keep up the great work!

Just want to say thanks to Robin for all your hard work. Glad to have Pinside back.

Robin, nice work. Take a well deserved break, at least a small one! Glad to be back!

Ah I see Achievements are down right now, and the streaks are paused! Now I’m slowly noticing what’s working and what’s not.

Robin, while you’re rebuilding the site, are you keeping some things offline or are you slowly finding out what’s broken and what’s not? I know this a monumental task, so I know patch notes don’t take priority, just figured I might ask!

That was intentional. It was a resource intensive site feature that wasn't essential, so it was temporarily disabled.

Since it looks like things have been going well so far, I'm sure it will return soon.

Robin - Thank you for all your hard work on getting this site back up and running again! I've used various guides and advice from so many on this site, I'm kinda lost without it. Also thank you to everyone who's helped me learn throughout the process... I've missed all you as well.

Appreciate all the hard work and efforts getting the site back online. I am amazed at the resources the site provides, and see how important it is to so many. Thank you.

This is my job (Critical datacenters)...There is a reason why water suppression is used rather than gas. It's all about client risk, DC risk and cost.

Most of the DC's I've managed had a water based suppression system. Running a Tier III or Tier IV DC is extremely expensive, as well as gaseous fire suppression systems, and when customers want to pay the cheapest price possible w/o redundant sites, then, when an incident like this happens (it is a "rare" occurrence like a plane crash, but they do happen), there are some consequences.

Just last month, Europe's biggest cloud service DC company (OVH) has a catastrophic fire, which many clients have lost their data (anyone plays Rust? LOL).

Not putting any blame on the pinside crew in any way, shape or form. Redundant client sites/DC's/servers "doubles" the hosting costs. Again, it's all about cost, risk and impact. You would have had a better chance of winning the lottery than face a catastrophic DC failure.

Congrats on the admin crew to bounce back so quickly and bringing back pinside in a few days.... major kudos!!!

I had a couple racks in the old Enron data center in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. We were up for a couple of days until the US Coast Guard confiscated our diesel supply on the roof for their recovery efforts! I was pissed.

Unless you’ve got Google bucks, things can and will happen.

Lot's of big companies out there with DR solutions they hope they never have to use.

If you feel like that I think you need to leave. Let me make that easy for you, I will refund your donation if you leave and never come back. I myself don't need your messed up attitude.

I happened to notice that late yesterday and PM'ed Robin about it. I had a hunch something like that might be what was going on with the achievements.

Thank you for this great resource and to all of those who have worked hard to get it back up and running.

Thanks Robin! Was a tough week without you.

Thank you Robin for all your hard work and dedication. I love Pinside!!

Is it "safe" to contribute at this point or should I wait until everything is completely back to normal? Thanks!

Jeff

Anyone else have issues with Hotmail? I’m not getting emails from my pm’s, and last time I think it was because Pinside was blacklisted or something.

The first thing I did when I noticed pinside was back up was update my donation. Easy peasy and no issues, donate with confidence!

Donated, well my yearly subscription was almost up but yeah upped it as well. Thanks robin for all the hard work going on In The background. Appreciate it mate.

I'm not sure if the email notification system is back up and running yet.

I’m getting emails.

Ok, I just heard from Robin about the emails. It sounds like if you have a Microsoft email address (outlook, hotmail, etc), the notification emails aren't getting through right now, but the issue should hopefully be resolved soon.

I just got one, its all fixed. Thanks!

Thanks for the news Robin!

In the list of little bugs, the Top 100 isn't refreshed on monday, unlike usual.

You have done wonders getting the site back up! I was just going to post that PDF uploads in one of the forum posts wasn't displaying but I see that it has been fixed. Will keep my eyes open for other issues.

Although I'm relatively new to this space, I was surprised how much I missed the Pinside world! So sorry for the catastrophe @robin!! Your work and commitment is unbelievable and really truly appreciated!

Many thanks Robin. The hero we need and deserve!

Thank you Robin for all your hard work!

Robin, don't even worry about being down for a few days. It's a minor disturbance among our first world problems and everything appears to be fine.

I am apart of another forum that focuses on 1960's Shelby cars (SAAC Forum). Well, that site crashed 18 months ago and everything was lost. 15 years of online forum history, discussions and significant information regarding everything Shelby...... gone. There were no backups and nothing was recoverable so we lost it all. It was a damn shame.

You've done an amazing job on this site and loosing a couple of hours of Pinside history is insignificant. Consider what happened to my other beloved forum and just think how lucky we all are to have everything back up and running again with almost zero loss of content. Besides, a couple days without Pinside made me realize how much I appreciate this site. You know what they say, "absence makes the heart grow fonder". So true.

Great job Robin, great job.

QSS

Would like to speak out the appreciation to the team ! Of course robin ,it must have been stressful.. but on the bright side, you survived!! Big time..
As many others , I was amazed how much I checked the site.
But as always , as Johan Cruijf says.. elk nadeel heb zn voordeel ...
Donation will be made..

Wow that’s depressing. Pinside is 18, I shudder to think about losing all the precious resources and stories, vid’s guides, and especially all the archives of pinheads who have coined up that great pinball hall in the sky.

Their stories are maintained here and nowhere else, they’d never come back if we lost them. It’s sad to hear about all that Shelby data lost, hopefully some of it has been archived?

Thank YOU Robin for being prepared for the worst, Pinside has survived to see another day!

I agree here, the story here is not that Pinside was down, but that it was really, really, really well backed up. And going forward it is going to be even more resilient. robin , thanks for creating such an enduring and important resource for our community!

Cough cough youporn ciugh cough

For robin. This buds for you.

Kind of like that guy who threw out his hard drive containing the encryption key to all his bitcoins.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/uk/bitcoin-trash-landfill-gbr-scli-intl/index.html

Yes, it was and is depressing. So much history, resources and stories were lost on the SAAC site. This temporary shut down of Pinside was trivial and nothing of concern. Robin saved 99.9999% of everything on Pinside. We are so damn lucky to have this computer savvy pinball nerd running the show.

When I say "computer savvy pinball nerd" I mean that in the highest form of compliment. After all, that's what I am and most of the rest of us are. I consider myself, and most of all the forum members here, absolute "computer savvy pinball nerd, shit!!" ......... figuratively speaking of course.

QSS

Seems like my "All posts made by you" activity is sort of 'hit or miss' w/respect to being current.

And thanks for all the hard work!

nice work Robin. Good decent backup time too - this is valuable resource so we appreciate it indeed.

EEVBLOG Dave in Aus, his forum went down and he made a video on it

Don't forget to update your Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) and Contingency Plans for lessons learned

I'm going to make my yearly donation earlier today and play some pinball. Maybe post some gifs.

Thanks Robin.