Golden Age Comics Updates

This site (more to be included as needed) is intended to serve as a temporary gathering place for the community normally found at the Golden Age Comics Website. For a while, now, there have been mysterious technical problems, so we want to have a place to keep people updated and not feel left out in the cold.

(The main site is back, so don't stay here unless you want your message lost in the shuffle.)

Currently, this “outpost” is being maintained by member “John C” (or “jcolag”) until the main site’s issues settle down. Feel free to contact me . Unless it’s “Have you heard anything new?” Because no. No, I haven’t. And I’ll absolutely forget to e-mail you when it’s back when it’s up, if you ask, so it’s probably not worth asking.
(E-Mail scrambling script courtesy Go Live Central, in case anybody else needs it.)

Lastly, feel free to spread the word. This page isn’t a secret. It’s to make sure that we can all land in the same place if any addresses or ownerships change.

The Story So Far…

I’m posting news items in reverse-chronological order (newest on top) for convenience, and have extended things back as far as my records go, for relative completeness.
Last Update: Sunday, 21 February 2010

• Sunday, 21 February 2010, cont’d — OK, it was all working when I wrote the previous entry. So welcome back, all over again…
• Sunday, 21 February 2010 — The main forum has been running for about a week, now. Downloads, while shaky in some respects, are also running.
  I’ll continue to maintain the forum here, in case of emergencies and anybody who needs to read the interim correspondence, but otherwise, I don’t expect to see much activity here.
  I’d call that good news.
• Saturday, 13 February 2010 — While waiting, we’re putting the temporary forum into official service. E-mails have been sent out so far to members who have posted more than twenty messages (a fair cutoff, we thought) and VIP members. Soon, we’ll look at how to manage our “lurker” members who have checked in recently, but are otherwise quiet.
  If you’re reading this and didn’t get an e-mail, it’s not an intentional snub. Believe it or not, I haven’t gotten the e-mail, either! Some mail servers just don’t trust me, I guess…
  And on that note, have a happy Valentine's Day, all.
• Tuesday, 2 February 2010 — Actual news!
  First, Serj has gone into semi-retirement, having been too busy to play with us, and the main site has a new owner. I’ll let him introduce himself once he’s ready (and skip the praise Serj definitely earned for keeping things running for so long), but he’s already hard at work on transferring things and getting those problems fixed. That’s the good news.
  The bad news? We’re down again, for (apparently) a variety of technical and bureaucratic reasons. So we’re back in “hang tight” mode, and I’ll be keeping the backup forum open until I know the “new guy” has gotten everything stabilized.
  Here is the backup forum, in case you hadn’t seen the other links there.
• Monday, 1 February 2010, cont’d — Sigh…
  That didn’t last long. Sorry if anybody needed the forum here while I put it in “Maintenance Mode.”
• Monday, 1 February 2010 — Whiplash time! The main site has returned, and we’re closer to that big announcement I mentioned a couple weeks back. Let’s hope there’s stability in the near future.
  Definite thanks to whoever got that running again.
• Sunday, 31 January 2010 — While we’re still holding out hope that the site will come back up and don’t want to take away from the great work Serj has done in getting this group together and providing a great service, we want to get something running, at least.
  So, for the duration, here is the new forum, restored from backup (again, thanks, Yoc!) and ready to go.
  Your user name and password should be exactly as you left it, and it even remembers which posts you have and have not read. Nobody is more shocked than I am that it all works fine.
  If anybody wants, feel free to spread the word. I’ll start sending out notifications to members with high post counts and/or who have used the forum recently.
• Saturday, 30 January 2010 — Three days have come and gone with no word from “on high,” so we're moving to the contingency. Give us a day or two to put everything in place, and I’ll post a link to the forum here, and try to get e-mails out to regular and recent users of the message board.
  The backup, in case anybody is worried, is from the 25th, so we're not losing more than a few hours’ worth of messages, thanks to Yoc.
• Tuesday, 26 January 2010 — While we’re still waiting on announcements…something seems to have gone wrong. Assuming it's another DNS issue, odds are it’ll clear itself up by the end of the week. If not, we’ll look at moving the community here soon.
• Tuesday, 12 January 2010 — Good news! Yoc has heard from Serj, who has news on where things are going. I’m not sure how much is “public,” but I'll update as soon as I have details and know I’m allowed to make the announcement. But right now, it sounds like things will stabilize (for the better) in the very near future.
• Monday, 11 January 2010 — We’re down again since early. It looks to me like a DNS problem, so hopefully this won’t last more than a day or two.

  $ ping goldenagecomics.co.uk
  Ping request could not find host goldenagecomics.co.uk. Please check the name and try again.

• Saturday, 08 January 2010 — While several of us were panicking and planning “doomsday scenarios,” the site came back.
• Tuesday, 05 January 2010 — The system seems to have gone down again late in the evening. Yoc has contacted the administrators in hopes they can get the “systems hamsters” to run around those wheels again.
• Friday, 11 December 2009 — While the forum seems to be back up, some people can’t see it yet. This is common for DNS updates, and usually takes a couple of days to get to everybody, so hang tight.
• Sunday, 06 December 2009 — The system has gone down again. The administrators have been given a poke to scream at the hosting company.

Note that this rundown doesn’t touch on the login problem on the download portion of the site. As far as I know, that’s simply going to be broken until it’s fixed, and nobody knows how to do that.

And yes, this is all hand-edited HTML. A blogging platform seemed overkill for a few single-line news items that we (hopefully) won’t need for very long.

Coming Attractions

If the situation doesn’t improve soon, I agreed to host a mirror/backup of the forum at this site. We have the software running and a backup ready to go, if we should decide the main forum won’t be stable. If/when that happens, I’ll link to it above.

We’re holding off on the decision to avoid any confusion. If half the community arrives here and the main site comes up for everybody else to post, we’ll have a bad time trying to re-integrate everything.

We are no longer holding off. The forum has been restored from a recent backup at http://goldenageinexile.co.cc/forum/index.php. As it comes and goes, I’ll try to keep it up to date with backups.

This backup site served its purpose, and the main forum and downloads are back up and running.

We also have no solid plans about hosting the enormous set of comic scans, due to the space and bandwidth that will require if it needs to be replaced.

Since there are inconvenient-but-free solutions to hosting individual files (Mediafire, RapidShare, and so forth), we’re focusing on keeping the people together, instead, because it's a great community.