I could not access this site for two days July 18-19.

Wesley

There were some back discussions between me and a moderator or two suggesting that somehow some spirit from the late body was once again trying to shut down this site for good..................

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

First time in nearly a week since I was last able to access the site. Site access has been intermittent for well over a month. It may be worth looking into placing login restrictions for viewing the site. It could help combat bots / ai scrappers

Yes, the timing was quite...ironic.

HI
I had the same problem,, it seen to take for ever, for the website just to come up, and once it did,, if you wanted to answer a post,, that seen to take a long time,,or the site would just keep on blinking,,waiting for acknowledgement.

As we all know when RYPN gets busy with guests it takes a while for the site to come up,, with so many of us,, trying to get on..RYPN is very popular among the railfans,, the railroad community, and railroaders in general.. Pat.

It's technical issues with the phpBB software and hosting. Outdated software, loss of functionality and, as confirmed by error messages, lack of disk space which either severely bogged it down or made it unresponsive.

However, today it seems to be running faster so maybe the disk space issue has been resolved? I'm concerned about the longevity of this website.

I was wondering if it was DOSed due to traffic about someone passing away.

We're talking thousands, maybe, not millions trying to get Taylor Swift tickets. We're dealing with tech going back to dial-up modems in 2025, much like needing Windows 95 laptops to diagnose Amtrak Acelas.

This is a consequence of outdated software and architecture--which cannot be changed or upgraded without the cooperation of ONE person............. and that person has resisted for some time.

His legal threats against the board were before my time here, and no one was allowed to explain it later. So, what exactly was he threatening to sue over?

Over the decades, for all the good Rowland and associates did for "mainline steam" from the 1960s to 1990s, he also created many problems as well. He got "where he was" by being a relentless self-promoter and salesman--in the tradition of P.T. Barnum, if you will--and he didn't shy away from this online, popping up on online rail forums besides this one.

Over the course of time, several "skeptics" of Rowland questioned his accounts here, and brought up numerous accusations against him. To be honest, I've heard so many, from complete strangers to trusted associates, that I've lost count/track of them. They ranged from shady business practices to violating speed restrictions at the throttle, from allegedly operating a passenger train while under the influence of alcohol to being banned from certain railroads.

Rowland's response was to threaten to personally sue the BOD of this non-profit website's administration for libel.

It didn't matter that the posts did not rise to the level of actual libel, let alone actionable libel, and that people who knew more about this than the average person told them as such. (I, for one, took two courses in libel in college and still keep up-to-date AP stylebooks and libel manuals on my shelves.) The threats prompted the then-BOD of the website, then poised to meld into a full-fledged, professional online successor to the late, lamented Locomotive & Railway Preservation Magazine, to resign, disappear, and reduce their role on this site to basically nothing. Since then, in spite of the efforts of various volunteer moderators, editors, and even webmasters, the site has remained a shell of its former self, reduced functionally to nothing but hosting three "bulletin board" forums.

In spite of his efforts to eradicate this forum/site from existence as an act of vengeance, he persisted in participating in this forum to the end to continue his self-aggrandizement.

There are reasons why the news of Ross's passing was greeted with unforgiving obscenities in certain online places.



Now, of anyone is going to complain about the above:

It's not possible to libel the dead, as they have no reputation left to sully. The memory of a deceased person can be damaged, but this cannot be addressed under the tort of defamation.

This morning it was moving thru the contact and sign in process in a reasonable time. Just now, it is beginning to act like it had been, with longer and longer intervals. Keep tuned...

This morning it popped right up like the good old days.
For the last few weeks it was like a glacier in a coma.
I see the guy who was let run our locomotive expeeded the seed limit and got us in trouble on the Wisconsin Central with an excursion train. We were hitting grade crossings before the gates got down.
When we stopped, said individual vanished before the WC officials could come up and chew our asses out for excessive speed (not to mention beating the hell out of our engine).
I don't recall his name. I've heard the name Steam Choo Magoo mentioned. Wonder who that is.

Clearly this site has a problem. I am nobody's tech expert, so I don't know what the answer is, but it probably is going to require either finding someone on here who is, or hiring someone who is. It may require asking those of us who have been on here regularly for a long time to donate towards securing this site so we don't lose everything on it, and that would be fine, as long as it doesn't drift into something really commercial and higher cost.

IF we still have a site owner / admin; then I would suggest that the site start using Cloudflare at the very least. Or we go with the TrainOrders route and require logins to read anything.