Is Archiseek gone?

Sponge Bob

Been down a few days for me at least. Some invaluable material on infrastructure there.

whyulittle

Site and forum are loading for me.

MadsL

All good for me.

Fairly tumbleweed on the forums these days but still an excellent site. Shame it hasn't come into it's own because a lot of the boom time observations about the destruction of Dublin were shown to be spot on.

strassenwo!f

I remember when the whole Platform11 messageboard disappeared off into the ether because somebody forgot to save it. A lot of good stuff wiped out at a stroke.

dowlingm

Would be nice to see the forums broaden out into a more generally urban affairs discussion and resource similar to Urban Toronto's

That username is already in use.

Archiseek used to be quite busy. I noticed a sudden drop of posts around the time of the property crash. Only a handful of people post there these days. Big pity.

It didn't help matters that Paul moved from vBulletin to phpBB. Big mistake. I don't know who managed the changeover but database errors and timeouts have been a frequent occurrence ever since. Even last week the site was down for a couple of days. Also, the phpBB interface is a headache for those used to vBulletin.

If he needed money for a vBulletin license and server costs, we would have been happy to donate!

expectationlost

and the owner moved to canada too

Sponge Bob

it is a great resource and if the owner ever decides to retire it should go to the national library

A Disgrace

Sponge Bob wrote: »

it is a great resource and if the owner ever decides to retire it should go to the national library

Some of Graham Hickeys and Gunters posts on the Dublin threads are of huge importance - and a valuable resource too. I really hope they are being archived. In fact, you could pretty much print off the entire 'Dutch Billy' thread, publish as is, and you'd instantly have the definitive history of these amazing buildings

Good to see a rush of activity there lately too, so don't write it off just yet

dRNk SAnTA

Props to the poster StephenC also, he has been keeping the site ticking over with photo updates.

I hope the site comes back to life. Merging a few of the forums could be useful, some of them have zilch going on. (mainly thanks to the recession)

Mr Simpson

Is it just me or has Archiseek been down for a good while now? I've been going to look at it a few times over the last few weeks, everytime I just get a page unavailable message

cgarvey

MarkMc wrote: »

Is it just me or has Archiseek been down for a good while now?

"Not just you": http://isup.me/archiseek.com

Mr Simpson

cgarvey wrote: »

"Not just you": http://isup.me/archiseek.com

Yeah I had a look at that. Pity, its a great site

strassenwo!f

dRNk SAnTA wrote: »

Props to the poster StephenC also, he has been keeping the site ticking over with photo updates.

I hope the site comes back to life. Merging a few of the forums could be useful, some of them have zilch going on. (mainly thanks to the recession)

I've been wondering if StephenC is actually the old poster Ctesiphon, a person who used to make very useful contributions to that site. He stopped posting regularly some time back and it was a real pity.

highdef

Working for me

Solair

Seems fine for me too!

A lot of the discussion that used to go on about it was about new buildings going up and planning for new developments.

Since the property sector crash, there's just almost no construction activity going on so it's just not very busy anymore as there's nothing to discuss in terms of new build.

I also suspect that a lot of its users were architects many of whom have emigrated as there is just not enough work for them anymore.

jesse pinkman

I see it's been down again for at least the last three weeks, the highly informative & witty poster 'Gunter' had only recently started posting again after a brief interlude himself, has Paul's interest in running Archiseek finally waned forevermore?

Anyone know what the story is?

tricky D

Paul posted a link to it from Facebook yesterday which works fine for me: http://archiseek.com/2014/poolbeg-chimneys-yeah-nay/#.U8brKijwonl

Mr Simpson

tricky D wrote: »

Paul posted a link to it from Facebook yesterday which works fine for me: http://archiseek.com/2014/poolbeg-chimneys-yeah-nay/#.U8brKijwonl

The site is working fine, but the forums give me an SQL error and I cant access them

jesse pinkman

Mr Simpson wrote: »

The site is working fine, but the forums give me an SQL error and I cant access them

Same here, its the forums I haven't been able to access for the last few weeks.

dRNk SAnTA

The forum seems to be working again today - hopefully it'll stay up now and start getting some activity like during the good old days (when everyone watched agasp as CGI images of ridiculous development after ridiculous development were being posted during the celtic tiger years)

zetalambda

Used to be a great site but has gone to shit in the last number of years. Wouldn't waste my bandwidth having a look at it now.

That username is already in use.

The forum's really been run into the ground over the past few years due to lack of maintenance and care. Big shame.

Paul should never have moved away from vBulletin. Ever since he changed to phpBB a few years ago, the site suffered continuous database errors and would sometimes be offline for weeks. Also, the character encoding during the transfer was botched so a lot of characters in older posts were garbled.

That username is already in use.

Archiseek forums down again for the past two weeks.

It's time for Paul to cut his losses and hand the forum over to someone else. He clearly doesn't know what he's doing nor cares about the community there. I've never seen such a disaster of a site.

What a complete waste. Get yourself together.

FreudianSlippers

A bit harsh. I think if he wanted, they could operate the forum under boards.ie - maybe not transfer all the threads, but at least it'd still be around.

jesse pinkman

FreudianSlippers wrote: »

A bit harsh. I think if he wanted, they could operate the forum under boards.ie - maybe not transfer all the threads, but at least it'd still be around.

Interesting idea, yet Boards.ie only recently deleted all its own Art & Architecture forums instead of just cleaning them-up & trying to reinvigorate them, so I doubt they'd want to take on Archiseek with all the issues that that would probably entail.

zetalambda wrote: »

Used to be a great site but has gone to shit in the last number of years. Wouldn't waste my bandwidth having a look at it now.

Cheers Paul.

dRNk SAnTA

Those forums are an excellent resource of historical information, articles, proposed developments etc, and a lot of high quality critique by GrahamH et al.

Would not like to see them lost - I hope if Paul needs help running it, he would reach out rather than shut it down forever.

jd

dRNk SAnTA wrote: »

Those forums are an excellent resource of historical information, articles, proposed developments etc, and a lot of high quality critique by GrahamH et al.

Would not like to see them lost - I hope if Paul needs help running it, he would reach out rather than shut it down forever.

It's back

From what I remember the error on the forums would have been easy to fix - a simple mysql table repair.

BowWow

Gone again..........

tricky D

Paul is talking about moving hosts at the mo due to rubbish support.

zetalambda

Hopefully. If not, then someone needs to take it behind the barn and shoot it.

A Disgrace

zetalambda wrote: »

Hopefully. If not, then someone needs to take it behind the barn and shoot it.

You seem to have some sort of vested interest in seeing it gone. Why does it concern you so much?

zetalambda

A Disgrace wrote: »

You seem to have some sort of vested interest in seeing it gone. Why does it concern you so much?

A vested interest? I just think it was a great site about 10 years ago but it's like a sick old dog now and the most humane thing to do would be to put it down! :pac:

tricky D

Many of us still find it a great resource despite the lack of recent updates and forum not working, so why kill it. That would be a bit like what happened to chaptersofdublin which is totally gone and only has limited content available via the waybackmachine, which is simply a pain.

zetalambda

tricky D wrote: »

Many of us still find it a great resource despite the lack of recent updates and forum not working, so why kill it. That would be a bit like what happened to chaptersofdublin which is totally gone and only has limited content available via the waybackmachine, which is simply a pain.

It's only the forum that I'm referring to really. I thought that it was primarily a forum with some ancillary pages so perhaps I'm wrong and it's the other way around. Maybe they should integrate the forum into another larger forum and leave the rest as is.

A Disgrace

I'd say give it a chance. without it, we'd be in a far worse place. its still a massive resource, even if people stopped posting in it. Plus, with the impending property boom, it'll spring back to life and be more essential than ever.

pedroeibar1

It is a superb resource - the posts by people like Graham Hickey, gunter and Praxiteles (not that church architecture is my cup of tea) are very valuable.
It is a pity it became unwieldy, many good posters left due to recession and others including me got locked out several times due to server changes. Still remember my arguments with PVCKing and garethrace!
Hope it gets sorted/becomes more user friendly, best of luck with it Paul if you are reading this.

karma_coma

Tab for the forums has been removed..hopefully in preparation for a relaunch on a new forum platform. That or it's been permanently lost

karma_coma

Apologies, it's actually back up there, but under the 'discussion' tab.

That username is already in use.

Jaysus, he's really messed it up this time. Passwords have all been lost apparently.

A lot of threads are corrupted and posts no longer have users attached to them.

http://archiseek.com/forum/topic/grafton-street-dublin/page/18/

The CSS is terrible compared to before and the entire forum is squeezed into 600px width.

What a mess!

ongarboy

I remember back in the mid 2000s consulting that site on a near daily basis as you'd get so many varied and interesting updates on what was going on (and of course there was a lot going on in the real world then infrastructure wise, count the cranes etc). I think I wasn't even aware of Boards existence at that stage. It must be years since I checked out Archiseek and actually forgot about it until I saw this thread.

A Disgrace

ongarboy wrote: »

I remember back in the mid 2000s consulting that site on a near daily basis as you'd get so many varied and interesting updates on what was going on (and of course there was a lot going on in the real world then infrastructure wise, count the cranes etc). I think I wasn't even aware of Boards existence at that stage. It must be years since I checked out Archiseek and actually forgot about it until I saw this thread.

Ah it has always had peaks and troughs – the total collapse of the construction industry meant there was very little to discuss, but now things are improving, I’d expect more activity

Don’t dig the new forum though, although hopefully they can fix it up

Hootanany

Remember the weird post about Pyramids?