We pass along the following note from Al Doran regarding the recent problems the Escribe site that had been hosting his mailing list:

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 Doran

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 12:20 am and is filed under General, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.