[Alsfastball] eScribe is down and maybe out!

[Al Doran]

eScribe is down and maybe out, maybe for good.


eScribe went down over a week ago, just as the ISC's were getting underway. 
This is not the first time they have crashed and been down for more than a 
few hours. In June 2004 they went down and were down for weeks while the 
owner bought and set up all new servers.

eScribe is privately owned, my company has nothing to do with it.  Al's 
Fastball is just one of hundreds of list servers that make use of the 
services provided by eScribe. This service has always been free.

Last year in June we learned that the owner, Scott Paterson, was working 
with a couple of unpaid volunteers to keep eScribe going. He had to buy 
expensive computer equipment to replace the servers that had worn out and died.

This week we learned that they major technical problems and the prognosis 
is not good.

See Scott's note to me today:

Al

Dead power supply and lack of financial support and non-paid volunteers. 
Going to try to fix it myself as soon as I have time, but really, with no 
end-user financial support, it's most likely done for.
-Scott

 >


This does not sound good.

Thousands of fastball fans miss their easy access to recent posts AND to a 
virtual gold mine of history on the game, posts from the past several years.

We are encouraging Scott to carry on, which is not easy as he cannot 
receive email any longer @escribe.com, the system is totally down.  We do 
write the occasional very short note to Scott at his work address but I 
cannot give this out, his employer frowns upon getting private email at his 
work place.

In the interim, we have been using Jim Flanagan's TEMP site, as our only 
site for posting fastball news.
That site is: http://www.fastpitchwest.com/alsfastball.htm

For now we are not calling it the TEMP site, its our only site at the moment.

We are looking at other options as the temp site does have some drawbacks, 
including the fact that the latest postings are at the bottom of the page 
and not the top. As well, if someone sends me a post and then changes their 
mind, its not that easy to remove the post in error as eScribe was.

Jim Flanagan has very kindly provided this site and I would most appreciate 
if you could tell your friends about it, many fans may not know about it. 
We have almost 2,000 fans on our subscriber list but we estimate there are 
at least that many who were looking daily at eScribe to get their fastball 
news.

Thanks

Al




  Als Fastball List
*Email: fastball at pmihrm.com
http://www.alsfastball.com/
http://www.ISCfastball.com/
NEWS: http://fastpitchwest.com/alsfastball.htm
eScribe is down, and may be out