LobsterTC wrote:Hey peeps,

I have been snowed under this last week so have only just had a chance to sit down and try to clear things up a little with what is going on with the TC situation. First of all i think i should start off by saying a massive thankyou to Rich for his work in setting up FUTOC for the meantime while TC is being sorted out, it really is appreciated and i think everyone who frequents TC should be buying him a crate of beers at the next meet up !!

Ok so, onto the unfotunate news of TC and what is now happening. As you are reading this you obviously know that TC is down and has been for around a week now. The reason for this is that the server on which it was held was permenantly deleted by the hosting company due to copyright infringement. The server on which TC was held also held my personal website for my Espai music band, and a mix hosting website for DJ's that Triptech (Simon, a very good personal freind and the main man who has helped me an untold amount over the years with TC for no personal gain) had on there for people to upload their mixes on. By all accounts Sony Music contacted the hosts of the server and reported that there was a copyright infringement on the DJ mixtape website. As such the hosts took it upon themselves to delete the whole server without permission, backing up the data or even contacting us first.

This then brings us onto whether TC was backed up or not. When i left the UK and handed the general running of the website to Paul (unograle) it was all in a bit of a rush and in all honesty, it was a huge amount of information for Paul to take in, once i had left i didnt even really think about TC and the day to day running of it as quite simply i was moving on and wanted to utilize my time to concentrate on other things that i wanted to do with my life and i knew if i was still putting in the hours through the week that i used to with TC it would be detremental to my goals. As such i cant even remember if i showed Paul how to back up the site but i most probably didnt even get round to it. I used to do regular backups but as it has been around 2 and a half years since i last did it i have looked on all of my harddrives and couldnt find anything.

To say i am gutted is a massive understatement, basically it is 10 years of work and of my life down the drain, not only that but it is all of the knowledge and collective effort of every single one of you that has gone and for that is all i can say is that i am truly sorry, in retrospect i should have put into place more stringent steps to make sure the site was backed up but i didn't, there is nothing more i can do or say on that subject now, i do however take full responsibility for it and i will be kicking myself for a long time to come i can assure you all of that...

So what does the future hold ? As it stands and if everybody is willing to show some effort too (with regards to posting and reuploading project and resto threads etc) i will rebuild the site from scratch, there are however upsides to this whole thing, since TC was built i have learnt a hell of alot more about website development, not only on the look, feel and end product, but also on the inner workings of the backend of the site, such as how to set up automated backing up which will be one of the first functions that i will implement. For the meantime FUTOC will be up and running as a temporary stop gap, i will redirect the turbocollective.net address to point old and new members straight here and in the next month or so i will build the new site and get it all running smoothly so the migration over to it will be as painless as possible.

If we could have a thread on here with suggestions for the new site (anything at all) i will correlate your ideas and try to implement anything that is essential and other things that are functional / wanted. TC will be back and it will be bigger and better than ever !!!

Thanks again to Rich and sorry once again to everyone, like i said the ability to look back at mistakes made is an easy thing to do, its frustrating, its gutting, its unfortunate and its inconvenient but i will try to put it right for you all...

Tom
LobsterTC