In the freestuff I just searched for "appleyard", and I found nothing at all. What has happened to my freestuff? I had over 100 entries! I then called search for "scuba", and that search only showed one entry: BlkBuddah's Meatcleaver #2 (Poser) For Non-Commercial Use Only Stand Alone Item Notes & Requirements By: BlkBuddah Sponsor: Grotto Azura Graffix May 22, 2000 PC/Mac 1171 downloads which is nothing to do with scuba diving. What's going on!?!?!?!?!?

First of all, let me apologize if your free stuff items were incorrectly deleted. Has the url that your freestuff was hosted on been down or unaccessible the past 2 days? We've added a batch job to cleanup dead links in the freestuff section. If your links reported dead 2 days in a row then they were deleted. I've checked and this seems to be the case.

Both of my web sites are online now. One of them wa s down earlier doday for a while. Please restore my freestuff items from your backup, as it would take me a LONG time to remake them all, and I would lose all the accumulated download counts. It was likely merely a brief down time. It seems that your cleaner was much too zealous and accidentally caught my two WWW providers' servers briefly down or overloaded on 2 days running. Please reload my freestuff.

I'll see what I can do to have them restored. Again I apologize, the script did run 2x in the past 24-36 hours and found that your links were unaccessible and therefore deleted them. I'll let you know the results of my efforts to get them restored as soon as I know something. Thanks. Tommy

Thanks. Please. Of my two providers, one is a large commercial paid site and they likely have busy periods; and the other is provided by a friend and his computer likely sometimes has to be taken offline once in a while for maintenance.

It must have been bad timing on both our parts then. I'll do my best to get this restored for you. :)

I found out today that all my free downloads are gone, too. They are hosted by Penguinisto and his server had some problems today, but I don't think that they were offline yesterday. His server is back online, but apparently all my free stuff have been deleted. Please put them back from your backup, too. They aren't nearly as many as Anthony's, but I'd rather have them back than have to reload them and lose the download count. Maybe you should give a little more time for determining whether a link is dead or not and maybe you could contact the members first before deleting their uploads. I'm not being a pain in the neck, this is just a suggestion that I think would work better for everybody. Thank you in advance for your help. Sue

The server in question was down for two hours, from roughly 1pm to 3pm MST. /P

It is possible that Penguinisto deleted your stuff Sue. He has done that before without notification. I think it's a power thing.

Sue - typically we would handle things as you mentioned. However, we have been somewhat lenient with the dead link section in hopes that the members would update their items. There were over 1200 free stuff items that were reporting 404's with each batch job. That equates to a whole lot of extra emails to notify members of dead links in the free stuff section. In this particular situation, there was a limited amount of time that we had to dedicate to extensive cleaning that needed to take place in this section of the site. Nonetheless, the batch jobs will be spread out a little more from this point forward. I will see to it that your free stuff gets restored as well. Thanks for your understanding in this matter.

Advance notice is such a wonderful thing.

Please add me to the restoration list. I'm also on Penguinisto's server.

Penguinisto - how many others are you hosting free stuff for that we might be concerned with? Any idea?

In addition to myself and Sue88, Penguinisto also provides hosting services for geralday and ElectricAardvark.

Thank you all for the answers, and thank you, tutone, for your help.

Let me get a list: Electric Aardvark Anthony Appleyard Blazerwiccan chohole chriscox digitali dolly duddly eigthdecay geralday jenay jewell KiDAcE little_dragon madriver Questor riptaylor sealtm2 stu Styxx Sue88 TygerCub Wadus Webvogel ywaters ...and this doesn't count ron knights (you banned him), x2000 (who pulled his stuff voluntarily earlier this week from R'osity), and hairybiker, who is a Faeriewylde regular. /P

I've had my freestuff up there for years. There was a boat load of stuff. Yesterday my server DNS rerouting service hit a glitch, today its back up (but I'm still monitoring it.) I was leading Nurd by several thousand downloads. You have successfully wiped out all my freestuff. Not one PhilC freebie remains. I simply do not have the time to reinstate it all, there were over 50 files.

Irrespective of recent fracas where some folks were voting with their feet and taking their toys with them..... I could care less, but I have to say that I'm just a little disappointed. A more asinine script to run I can not imagine. Can someone please phone me to explain themselves.

I'll have them restored PhilC. Very odd that everyone had server problems the two days we decide to run the batch job to clean up the dead links. I apologize. Tommy

Mine was real simple - an IT intern monkey in the school got a bit too happy with a pair of wire cutters; took 30 minutes to discover there was a problem, 1 hour to chase down the idiot responsible and find out WTF happened, and 30 minutes to track and patch the sliced wire. I do wonder why you'd run the cull script at Broad Daylight EST, though... yuck. /P

Well, that's really simple actually. It was so that I could monitor it. The script had to return HTTP headers to determine whether the links were dead or not, which can be quite time consuming for the servers to respond and I wanted to make sure the scripts weren't timing out waiting for the HTTP header info to come back. Not to mention the script had to call well over 7000 url's to get headers from. It's not a time friendly script to have to run. :)

But what I don't understand is, if the link was only dead one time or only one day (like in Penguinisto-hosted items' cases) why were they deleted? You said, "If your links reported dead 2 days in a row then they were deleted." In our case it was only 2 hours, on one day. I understand that it's a big job to do this, but I think the script needs to give a longer grace period for server problems.

Thanks,

Now what of the future? Do I have to nurse my box every 1 hr 59 minutes to ensure that when your script is checking, it can be first in the queue? I grant you is not as efficient as being on an ISP but folks are continually getting my freestuff, have been for years. There is no way I'm going to pay more than I am to give stuff away free. I get far more emails of thanks than "can't get your files". I accept that you don't want dead links but its evident from these posts that your method of removing them leaves a lot to be desired. I most strongly suggest that you pitch the script into the bin and either put up with the dead links or find another way. This way is an unmitigated disaster.

Content Paradise goes up, and suddenly Free Stuff gets deleted by the truck load... Sounds like another conspiracy theory in the making! :) Renderosity, the new X-Files! Regards- Lemurtek

If that script is run at about the same time every day, it likely WILL keep finding that particular servers seem to be down because they are overloaded that time of day because of the natural daily and business work cycle. Same as, for a long time I only accessed the WWW in UK early morning because it got too slow from overload during USA daytime and early evening. (I live in England.) My files seem to be still present on Penguinisto's server. What was deleted was Renderosity's pointers to my stuff that was on Penguinisto's server and also Renderosity's pointers to my stuff that was on the paid internet provider called Demon. Please, is there any estimate of how long it will be before all the above-listed people's freestuff pointers will be restored?

bookmarking

I could not access Renderosity the other day, tried again a little later still nothing. So I deleted the bookmark. Shame really, was a good site, but there you go. .......... DUMB!

OK try this, set your script to notify me by email that the link is broken. When folks do this I don't get bent out of shape, I thank them sincerely for taking the trouble to tell me. I then run around like a BAF to sort out the problem. Include something like, "We'll be rechecking every few days but links that remain dead for over two weeks (a month would be better) will be deleted." Give plenty of time, yes you need to tidy up but you don't dust your fine Dresden porcelain with an industrial shop vac. I would imagine that after six weeks the bulk of the housekeeping will have been achieved, after that its just routine.

Its history now but yesterday I noticed that my server which normally glows cherry red and keeps my toes toasty warm had cooled off. Checked the connections and they had almost stopped. A hundred per hour down to less than 20. Then like a fool I went looking for the problem. The adage "if it aint broke don't fix it" came full into force. I forget the number of times I checked the permissions etc. I even purchased new upgrade software. In the cold light of this morning everything becomes very clear.

Doesn't seem to be any free stuff of yours at the moment PhilC

Anthony Appleyard you have one item

I know. That is my patrol-type boat and I uploaded it after the Disaster.

FYI We should have everyone listed here restored sometime today. My apologies. Tommy

Hey Phil :) Does your comp heat up your house too? Mine does Hoping landlord gets the heat fixed here soon

This is MrsPhilC. I don't usually post to these threads but I would like to have a say in this fiasco. My husband, PhilC, is one of the most patient and temperate people I've ever known. In the time I've known him I've only seen him really angry about three times. Last night was one of them. He is too much of a gentleman to say what he really thinks of this latest development and I'm too much of a lady to repeat what he's said. At any rate, this 'cleansing' of dead links, while a good idea in theory, was such a waste of intelligence and consideration for artists/merchants as to be almost unforgivable. It is just a good thing that this mistake can be rectified. At least I HOPE it can be rectified and the statistics put back the way they were. Phil and nerd had a very friendly rivalry going and it was one of the enjoyable things around here. Thanks for letting me spout a bit. MrsPhilC

I had a feeling something was going on over there last night Mrs P. Phil IM'd me. Then disappeared for the night. I figured he was out kicking the dog, pulling his beard out, and sending e-mail bombs to the Renderosty admins e-mail accounts. ;-) I've never seen him blow his top. But I could tell he was really PO'ed. ScottA

FYI - No data has been lost. As far as I can tell all free stuff items that were deleted from the members that have communicated to me or that are listed in this thread have been restored. If there are any items that you notice missing please contact me and I will make sure they get restored. Thanks. Tommy

just checked my freestuff area and found out, that half of it is gone. i started to repair some of the broken links. i think the idea of cleaning up broken links is good, but 2 days are a bit short. anyaway, i redid some of my older items and i am going to re-upload them within the next days. no need to resend me the stuff, penguinisto, it's all on a safe place on my harddisk. thanks again for hosting :) joe

And please don't delete any 404 freestuff items for now, until the stuff on Penguinisto's server has found a new host and the thumbnail and zipfile links to it have been redirected.

My files seem to be still present on Penguinisto's server. What was deleted was Renderosity's pointers to my stuff that was on Penguinisto's server and also Renderosity's pointers to my stuff that was on the paid internet provider called Demon. Something to make ya go..."Hmmm".. keeps her eyes on this development

jumpstartme2, but now /P's servers are down...permanently. thanks to one of our favorite peoples...a warez kitty.

jumpstartme2 - I restored those that made me aware that they had freestuff items deleted. I just checked the backup from the day before I ran the scripts and you had no freestuff items there for the script to delete.

tutone1234: I never had any freestuff up to begin with,[thought about it tho] I was just reposting a portion of Anthony's post (#24) and was just wondering why the pointers were missing. Not a biggie. :) Jani :)~

Would it be reasonable to assume that if all my freestuff has not been restored yet then its not ever going to be so?

I keep on my own PC echoes of my web sites. That way I can alter things in my own time without wasting dialup line phone bill. Also, that gives me a check-list of what freestuff I have.

Phil: some of the freestuff is still not restored, but it isn't gone forever. It may be back later in the week. Kevin.

okeydokey :)