Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Whither art thou, tracksy?

I'm astonished not to have read anything about tracksy.com's outage on any other blogs. It's not just me, is it?

tracksy.com, one of the top blog stat services, has been out since at least Friday. On Friday, all you could see was the entire Perl code reprinted on your screen. Since about Saturday, this has been replaced with an apology for a temporary outage over the weekend. It's now Tuesday, and no signs of life.

I sent them an email simply asking how long the outage will be and have received no response. Considering how many other people use tracksy, I would have expected to hear more noise about it in the Blogosphere.

I also have Google Analytics running, and I've always considered moving to another stat system, since tracksy is only free until 25,000 recorded page views a month. I have come close to passing that on occasion. But then, tracky somehow manages to lose some of my stats anyway, and the number drops again. Not exactly the most reliable of services, although it is free and I like the formatting.

Hopefully, this is just a blip.

Update Jan 11: Finally, they're back up, although they have lost several days worth of information and apparently a lot of user accounts, as well. As I'm a free customer, I have no cause to complain. If I were a paying customer, however, I would be rather upset. Not professional, guys.

Game Links:

Board Game Speed Dating - a little racy, but there you have it.

An article about Virtual Research Ethics at gamesblog, analyzing the parallel ethical issues of research on people within virtual worlds to real world issues.

d21 talks about why we game as opposed to other activities, and flatteringly coins the word "Yehudesque". And I thought my wife was going to be turned into an adjective before I was.

Bil Toland of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette laments how even games like Trivial Pursuit are becoming dumber with each new edition.

Games Workshop, of Warhammer and some board games fame, is not meeting its profits expectations.

The Claremont Courier carries an article about a local game store, Gameology, and a nice article about new games. And several papers carry a similar article about the Changing Hands Book Shoppe, in Joplin, Mo.

Yehuda

Tag:

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been to Changing Hands, actually, but not on a game night. I managed to snag an English copy of La Citta; that's my major recollection of the place. I may have to time my next trip through Joplin for one of their game nights...

Anonymous said...

News from Tracksy:

"Unfortunately one of our servers crashed over the weekend and we lost a lot of data and you might possibly need to sign up again. We apologize terribly for the inconvenience and hope that you can forgive us."

And now my login doesn't work. That's just fantastic, thanks Tracksy! Jerks.

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Thanks boonie.

They're back up, but it looks like they could use a lesson in redundancy and professional service.

Yehuda

Anonymous said...

They won't answer my emails...it's been nearly a month now.

I had a paid account.

Rrrrrr.