I was on the review team, it's so sad this has had to close. A real good bunch of guy's kept this up and running in their spare time, only silly Hardware fault's kept it down alot of the time.
Alot of attachments and knowledge will have been lost if they can't get a read only state site up with the backup recovery
T'is a shame, its was nice having a central hub for everything.
Obviously very difficult running such a massive empire free for all, they've had so many disasterous faliures over the years and I think that is what encouraged various racing sim communities to go and get their own forums (e.g. LFSforum, and the GPL community moved to SRMZ), which didn't help.
I think they did a fine job when it did work considering it was all free voulenteer work.
to be honest is everyone really that surprised? it was down for almost a year and if you're properly honest did you really miss it?
I didnt and i used it all the time. Ive just learned that you have to move onto other forums and now ive found some communities that are a thousand times more friendly and better run than RSC ever was.
It is sad that the place that began it all as such is gone but we'll just have to do with what we've got. RSC just wasnt the same the past few months since it came back.
Also their statement to me is utter bs, they're blaming the community for not being willing to help or pay their damn bills for them. They choose to run these things, if they cant afford it incase the community doesnt donate then they shouldnt do it. Its not our fault its theirs.
Seems very strange (and somewhat unprofessional) to have online backups of critical customer data rather than offline backup. If I was paying for hosting for something major like an international forum I would expect nightly offline backups to be taken of critical data. I've never really used RSC but I understand its significance in the early stages of LFS development, so I suppose we have to appreciate it for that.
I'm sad that the realms of information provided there is gone, but I can't say I am surprised as most topics that I was interested in had newest post in 2005. Hardly any real activity there from my experiences, though it was a convenient spot and the information it had will be missed, though I can't say much about the community there because as far as I am concerned its always been too inactive.
As mentioned in their web site, it's hard to believe two failures in separate systems and hard drives occurred at the same time, and there wasn't some form of archival backup that could be used to restore RSC to a state perhaps a week or a month old.
I still have bad memories of this from the earlier days. RSC was the only forum ever that felt they needed to punish their members by using a public warning system. I quit RSC after receiving one of these for posting a old (2002) video of an onboard lap at Spa spaf1.wmv claiming they could get sued for copyright violation, demanding I get a letter from Bernie Ecclestone and mail it to them before they would remove the public yellow card on every post I ever made at RSC, even though it's the team, track, or video maker owners that own copyrights, (which is why LFS can have a BMW F1 car even though it doesn't have the rights to the F1 series), and in spite of the fact that video had been posted at other web sites for years without issue before I posted a link at RSC. During this period, anyone posting questions about the public warning system was permanently banned.
Towards the end, RSC mostly served as a good repository of information, and it will be shame if they can't recover the data. For a while, there was some activity in the iRacing section, but that had virtually ceased by the time of failure, and there are game specific forums now, such as LFS.
The newsgroup, rec.autos.simulators, served this purpose, but there's been little activity in the last few years, since there are now so many game specific and other generic forums.
I've seen a few sites that extract newsgroup posts into HTML in a forum-like manner. I don't know if you could post on the extracted page and have that reflected in the newsgroup though (i.e. a post would automatically be created and submitted to the newsgroup when you posted on the forum-like page). Newsgroups are still quite popular though (but mainly for warez rather than for discussion).
This is how microsoft newsgroups work. You can access, including reading and posting of messages, to the newgroups via usenet or via html web sites (several initial links, but they eventually end up accessing the same newsgroups):
No, it's their fault they ended up becoming a single point of failure for the community, instead of an improvement. Which is exactly why a lot of people ran away from them. Sure, you can have a failure and downtime. But years of them without a good backup? That's their fault.
They !&%$ on themselves. It's a miracle they didn't die 3 years ago when the whole disaster started.
unlike a few of you 