Plastic.com has been down for a while; does anyone know what's up?

December 11, 2001 6:11 AM

Apologies if this is the wrong venue, I can't think of another place to ask:
"Just give us a couple of days" said Plastic as they went offline about a week and a half ago. Anyone know if they're over and done with?? :(
posted by BentPenguin to General Weblog-Related at 6:11 AM (12 comments total)

Moving a Slashcode site to a new server is a tough job. If that's what Plastic is doing, as the note claims, it could just be taking more time than expected.

(As an aside, I'm not sure Carl's shtick has ever seemed more tired than it does in that note.)
posted by rcade at 6:19 AM on December 11, 2001

well, a visit to fucked company is a good way to take the pulse of a dying dot.com

and carl steadman has a wee journal

and yeah, what rcade said - take a look at whats happening to kuro5hin for a relevant benchmark
posted by sawks at 6:24 AM on December 11, 2001

According to Carl's latest Note, he needs to finish up a few details and run some tests. MeFi is fun and I have enjoyed my stay, but really "there's no place like home."
posted by mischief at 7:33 AM on December 11, 2001

Er, K5 isn't a Slashcode site. Moving K5 would have been easy, if we had hardware to move to and data to move. We started off with neither, hence three weeks. Everything's finally coming together though...

The problem is that Plastic isn't giving anyone any info, besides the one page of incomprehensible gibberish. Poor community leadership, IMO.
posted by rusty at 9:39 AM on December 11, 2001

Plastic has always been page after "page of incomprehensible gibberish".

You have to be a plastitute to decode it.

;-P

Watch paint dry
posted by mischief at 10:04 AM on December 11, 2001

Like mischief said, Carl updated the notice on Plastic.com to something a lot more informative. I got a peek at Plastic running on his test server, and everything already works, but I think Carl is optimizing some of the famously slow-loading pages and removing some things that were obsolete or inaccurate.

Rusty's right, and because of the lack of info I think Plastic is going to have a bit of trouble rebuilding trust with its users. At any rate, I would recommend to any Plasticians reading this that you gather a few of the most interesting newsish items that occurred during Plastic's downtime and get ready to submit them as soon as the site is up so that we can kick-start the story flow and catch up...
posted by Humberto at 1:22 PM on December 11, 2001

Humberto, you know MayorBob is just gonna cut and paste all his MeFi submissions like he always does. ;-P
posted by mischief at 1:26 PM on December 11, 2001

Poll: How many MeFites here also read Plastic? I'm curious.
posted by gd779 at 1:42 PM on December 11, 2001

umm.. i tried once or twice. i'm sure it's a great community and all, but "i keeps it real with the #006699." er, rather, i didn't enjoy myself much.
posted by lotsofno at 4:41 PM on December 11, 2001

It will be great to get back to plastic when it comes back online. But I have to echo what Humberto said. The silence from Carl and Joey was deafening during plastic's downtime. As a matter of fact, I have to doff my hat to Humberto for providing more meaningful information than we got out of the note that originally appeared at the site. I, likewise, am a bit concerned about whether plastic might have lost some of its regular citizens.

And mischief, I can assure you, I will use all brand new stuff when we start submitting again.


posted by MAYORBOB at 6:34 PM on December 11, 2001

Tangentially, I had a CommunityZero site for some old drinking buddies of mine for quite a while (still there, but...). A couple of months ago, they put up a notice that they were going offline for 3 days to upgrade the web app. About a month later, they were back up, without the promised upgrade. Killed our little community thing dead.

They had my sympathies, of course. I'm sure they lost enormous amounts of revenue from their paying customers, and they probably weren't too worried about the loss of freeloaders like me and my old mates, but ouch. The pressure must be hellish when an upgrade/sidegrade goes bad and people keep hitting the site, getting less and less patient...
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:20 AM on December 12, 2001

I just noticed that as of 12/15, Plastic has a new note from Carl, if anyone is interested.
posted by Mid at 10:10 AM on December 15, 2001