Topic: PA Down Again

Error code 522 strikes again

I wish I knew that that site was being backed up by multiple people (a mirror site with another host would be very nice, but not sure how expensive and practical it would be). At least the data ideally should be in the hands of multiple known people.

One day it might all just go "poof" which would be so sad considering the many tens of thousand of hours that many, many people have put into the site (the artist additions, album additions, reviews, corrections, evaluations, and while I would like to take a break from that site, I would be so sad to see the forum gone).

Will openly admit I have very little understanding of how much it takes (both money and time) to keep these sites alive, iron out bugs and crashes and generally just keep things evolving. But I get the impression the original creator of PA is less active in sorting things out (maybe was different previously?) whereas at this end Mike seems to be constantly working on things. If I wasn't spending every penny we have keeping a roof over our heads I'd probably contribute something monetary rather than just being an irritating end user!

Logan, you're saying nobody has backed up the Progarchives????

What the Hell are you guys thinking?

M@X is still involved, but not really much in contact with people there. I have tried to contact him various times, spoken to him before, but others have had more success. Awesomeprog is a different kettle of fish. Mike is very much involved with this site both regularly and publicly. He is not the apparently absentee landlord type from what I have observed. This site is more Mike's baby (M@X took over a site from others, has made changes...).

It can get very expensive, and I'm sure that donations at both sites are appreciated. I would happily pay towards a mirror site for PA, but mostly I would like to know that the data is being saved by multiple people. Unforeseen things can happen and I would hope that it could continue with or without any one person in particular. While it is owned by one person, it is a hugely collaborative project which people have donated huge amounts of time to, and I would like to see it continue in some form long after various of us are gone.

I'm not saying no one has backed it up, and I know there have been back ups. I'm saying that I don't know who, other than M@X has back-ups. I have barely communicated with him and was not chosen as an Admin by him. Voluntary admins choose voluntary admins and have been for all my years there, many with no involvement with the site owner. I don't know how aware he is of my existence.

There is a major disconnect between the volunteers (such as myself) and the site owner and our involvement, say in things and knowledge of many things is very limited. There is a lack of communication. M@X just left people to do their own thing and keep building the site according to the architectural set-up. I'm not complaining, but it has worried me.

If that was not clear enough, it's not really a what are you "guys" thinking, it's more of a what is one guy, M@X, thinking. Since we don't communicate, I don't know what he's thinking or doing commonly. I would hope that multiple people would be entrusted with back-ups and that those people were known and could be contacted should the site seem to disappear. M@X had tried to sell the site years ago, and I don't how much of the data he considers to be his property, but it is a communal effort. Not complaining or wishing to malign M@X, I just wish there was better communication, more transparency, and known contingency plans.

Before joining PA, I was involved with three sites that just got shut down or disappeared. One forum asking for ideas for a TV show was shut down after I starting asking about the intellectual property rights and acknowledgement of users who submitted material for consideration. They shut it right down and used things I wrote for the show without asking permission, let alone any reimbursement, acknowledgement or thanks. I should have tried to sue despite their attempts to remove the evidence. I had never agreed to that, not even in fine print of which I was aware. Pretty sure I read what terms and conditions there were.

sorry, that was just a reaction to what should be something obvious. a server failure, which can happen at any minute for no reason, can wipe everything forever.

i get it, M@X isn't being transparent about it, but it's still concerning...

What the Hell are you guys thinking?

I sometimes wonder the same thing when I see the level of commitment by some users either here or at PA. Even with RYM, everyone should be prepared that the whole website might not be there anymore from one day to the next. Not saying that it's likely, but it can and does happen.

I think this is mostly a mindset issue. Just don't expect that anything you do online is here to stay forever. You are not going to either! Eventually all turns to dust, so we might as well enjoy the moment :-)

The internet could be gone tomorrow; humanity might go extinct. I find the level of commitment can be odd and ultimately does seem quite futile/ something of a waste of time from my perspective. If it gives people some sense of well-being in the moment, some enjoyment, some purpose, I am okay with that, especially if the recognise that it might all disappear at any given time for any number of reasons. When it's in the hands of multiple people I think it less likely to easily disappear.

I know that I and my wife might die soon (we both have health issues -- my wife had heart attacks, and I've had strokes), and I have a will for my assets, and a life insurance policy (through work). I have assets that I wish to pass on. I especially care about my kids (youngest just graduated high school and is going into computer engineering). I have contingency plans. While endeavours such as Awesome Prog and Prog Archives might be seen as very trivial in the grand scheme of things, contributing should hopefully be an enjoyable hobby and one should have a sense of perspective and awareness that it won't last forever and could all go "poof" at any time, I still think it worth having contingency plans to protect the results even if it's mostly just out of respect to the huge amount of time that volunteers put into the site. Personally, I don't think that the project is really important, nor would I put as much time into working on it as many others do (look at that Errors and Omissions team, all of the bands being added etc.), but I care about the people and how it would make them feel to see it all vanish especially if it was easily preventable (especially by involving others so they have access to backups/ data). To me that's respectful, thoughtful and charitable.

Mostly I just liked the site for the forum for having conversations with people, exploring perspectives, talking about music I like, discovering music, and for having a few good-natured laughs (even If I was the only one laughing).

I realise when one puts huge amounts of work into something, as many have, that it can be difficult to abandon the project and witness it amount to nothing. The sunk cost fallacy comes into play. I think it sad to think that all might be lost, and how that might affect some, when it could have been preserved at least somewhat longer, and I wish people had some assurances that there was more of an attempt to protect the work (even just as a kindness and recognition of the efforts). Maybe some, including myself, would have found better (more productive and beneficial) uses of their time had a site like Prog Archives not existed at all and maybe it would be better for some for it to just disappear. Excuse the what iffery. Who knows?

Indeed! My point was not to be scared that everything might end tomorrow, but to find a strategy that works for you independently of what happens to these websites in the future.

I need to work on that. My method of finding new stuff to listen to entirely relies on these two websites...

^ So you have a fallback for each one of them :-)

I really like RYM as a data source, because of the sheer number of users. But that's also why I don't like it as a community or even website in general, because it feels so profit-driven and ultimately soulless. I like the community aspect of PA in general, but there are some members there that I just don't get along with on a personal level, plus the owner is really detached and ultimately also entirely profit-driven. Checked out progressive ears, but there is very little going on there and people seem to be allergic to doing anything other than occasionally talking about albums.

What can you do? Try to enjoy your life! Use some of the websites some of the time and focus on your own musical journey :-)

I mostly use Rate Your Music to discover new-to-me music (searching the charts often with multiple filters/keywords), but I have listened to things due to this AP site. That recommendations feature is excellent. With Prog Archives it is via the forums that I have discovered much music (and recommendations via PM). I have found ones of interest by google searching Reddit (when looking for similar bands/artists/albums to ones I really like, especially).

It looks like PA might be down again today. I haven't been able to access the site.

Websites can certainly disappear overnight in extreme circumstances. I remember a site called Mindawn.com that began back in 2004, and was similar to Bandcamp in that it provided a music distribution service for artists in FLAC or OGG formats. It provided a pretty unique service back in the day (see https://www.audioholics.com/news/mindawn-the-latest-music-download-service), and as it grew, much of its content was prog, and numerous well known artists used it, but sometime in 2013 they had a catastrophic HDD RAID failure which affected both the main drive and the mirroring drive, and apparently the data couldn't be recovered, meaning that all their files were lost.

There was a basic holding page retained at Mindawn.com until September 2018, but all other links and pages had been unavailable since the crash in 2013. This was how the site looked just before the crash: https://web.archive.org/web/20120922055408/http://www.mindawn.com/, and this was how it looked for the next five years: https://web.archive.org/web/20180929125108/https://www.mindawn.com/. It was a major blow for all those artists who had signed up and relied on the company to distribute their music.

There used to be several articles on line discussing what exactly had happened to the company, but I can't find any of them now.

I've put in countless hours of work at PA since I registered there back in June 2011. It would be very sad indeed to see all that go up in smoke lol!

Yes, I used Mindawn back in the days, until it suddenly disappeared.

I think we should treat any website we use, even giants like YouTube or Facebook, as something that could disappear tomorrow. So for all the content you donate to a website by posting it there day after day after day, you should be comfortable with it being gone one day. Or to put it the other way round: You probably should not invest so much effort on a website with the expectation of a long-time collaboration between you and the people or company running it.

My solution: I accept the temporary nature of any website and use it in a way that benefits me NOW, and POSSIBLY also in the future. But the focus is on NOW. For this website it means that, aside from the PA genre teams, you can use it to find new music to listen to. That's an immediate benefit, and you "pay" for it by donations and/or rating and reviewing releases. It's a give-take relationship that works well in the here-and-now, and hopefully we can keep it going for a long time :-)

As happened a few months ago, the ability to actually assign a rating to some albums on PA seems to have disappeared. A slightly fundamental flaw :D

am noticing on my firefox fork that the progarchives literally can't get past the cloudflare captcha if https always on is turned off. never noticed how bloated the site is until now with the facebook and google trackers... :(