News

28th December 2009 [RSC] Important Announcement

[This is the original announcement posted on RSC forums today]

Dear Visitor,

As you will no doubt have gathered by now, the multiple hardware failures on our servers two weeks ago have caused us some serious problems. Not only did our forum server fail completely, according to our host's support department, but our backup server containing our regular backups of RSC data also experienced a failure at or around the same time. As yet, we don't know fully what caused the problems that have been described to us by our host, and we can't quite believe the 'bad luck' of having two servers die in one afternoon.

At present, our focus is on recovering as much data as we can from the damaged hard disks. We have purchased the various disks from the host, in order to pass on to a third-party data recovery firm. This could be an expensive process for us, and is certainly not one that we can guarantee will work, or that we can complete immediately. (To that end, if you work for a data-recovery firm, and can help in some way, please email community@racesimcentral.com).

So, what's the plan? Our plan is to close this chapter in RSC's history and announce the end of the RSC forum community in its various forms. This has been a difficult decision for us, but the road of the past 3-4 years has been leading to this point.

Back in RSC's heyday, we had many committed volunteers and supporters, who covered RSC's costs and took on various tasks such as developing a front-page, moderating the forums, maintaining our servers, etc. Over the yeras, this support has diminished, and for the last two years, RSC has been running on a skeleton crew, lacking the necessary skills to keep the community going, and struggling to 'break even' each month.

We wholeheartedly believe that this move is for the best, not only for our staff (who can hopefully get at least some of their free time back), but also for the community at large.

Our plan, should the data recovery process achieve anything significant, is to create a static mirror of RSC in its most recent state, to allow for reference and downloading of attachments - but this relies completely on the recovery procedure.

We hope that this doesn't turn out to be the complete end of RSC, but this chapter at least, is closing. We sincerely hope that you have enjoyed our 8 years of service to the sim-racing community, and that the knowledge and friendships gained here will continue to be of value to you for years to come.

Kind Regards,

Mikkel & James


Note: For the time being, our subsites will continue to be online - but we cannot guarantee that we can support this venture into the future. We advise that you look for hosting for your project elsewhere. We will make every effort to save sim-racing ventures and websites that are hosted on our servers, but are no longer actively maintained.