Classic British Flight Sim

The Alphasim and Sim Outhouse forums appear to have been zapped at the same time. Strange. :think:

Hi Fungus

SOH is up now. Seems they've had a database crash and may have lost a pile of stuff! :o

Not sure about Alpha. Their shop is up.. not tried the forum

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Perhaps AS need to put some 50p's in the meter.

I find it unusual that the Alphasim forums are still down. You'd think that the lack of a forum could hurt sales...or maybe not.

Brian

Perhaps they've decided not to bother with forums any more as they seem to spend many hours a day having to police them.

Perhaps its not an easy fix...............

It is no secret that Phil tolerates the forums at arms length, the recent furors elsewhere may well be a deciding factor in there continued closure.

I did ask internally and the reply I got was the the forums went down due to a technical reason at the server, just like many others did around the globe. Regarding the future, three options were conveyed, normal service is resumed, forums are resumed but severely cut back, ie only one forum for customer issues, and finally, no forums at all.

Initially and knowing Alphasim past views on forums I'd have laid a wager on option two, however its been to long for that so option three is looking more and more like the resultant outcome. There are other factors involved like policing, arguments, are we there yet posts, a historical dislike for forums full stop and an overhead on band width, throw in reduced sales and a slowing market as well as a move to some if not all boxed sets through the flight1 wrapper, then it is easy to deduce that they might remain closed for some time yet.

However, I think that what ever they choose should be communicated as soon as possible, in this instance no news is not good news, its very bad, if there to be closed then out with it and everyone can move on, if they're not, then an explanation as to what is planned short or even long term, the silence is probably more damaging than any other option.

The forced absence will show how much they are actually needed or not needed, its an interesting strategy but in these times, a risky one if you want to keep customers on the hook, of course if your confident that they're already on the hook then you never need forums again.

Best

Michael

RobDob wrote:Perhaps its not an easy fix...............

That depends on your level of enthusiasm to fix it ;-) , everything is fixable if you really need it.

Best

Michael

Didn't say it wasn't fix-able! ;-) Who knows what may or may not happen over the next couple of days/weeks...... I keep on going to the forum out of habit! :brick:

Hi...

It's not only the AS forum that's down.
Trying to display some screenshots from several of their products, I got this message:

Coppermine critical error:
Unable to connect to database !

MySQL said: Access denied for user: 'dbo118937848@%' to database 'db118937848'

So in my humble opinion they really do have some server problems.

Grtz.
tonka