absconding to Ireland and feckups at the hosting

Sorry that nearby.org.uk and related services have been offline for most of the past week. I am currently away for a trip in (not so) sunny Ireland, and the first halve was camping so was away from Internet connectivity.

Anyway minutes before I went away I got a deluge of emails saying the site if offline? what?? It turns out my generic credit card had expired, and without warning (feck) the machine was switched off. But this was 12am so their phone lines where closed (billing at least) – so a hasty phone call on the move in the morning and with the new card details they said be back within a few hours – not ideal but the best could do. I carried on my merry way and didn’t think any more of it (my mistake!), but the real feck up was that yes they had re-enabled the machine, they just forgot to re enable it at the switch…

It appears to be back now after much international phone calls….

btw – feck isn’t considered a swear word in Éire, and when in Ireland, do as the Irish do. (which is use it a lot!)

Update: as an amendum to the above, it turns out that on wednesday (3 days after it was switched off) a letter did arrive at home stating that they intended to turn off the server unless payment was received – and that it would take three days to reactivate the server. Which is at least factual.

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2 Responses to “absconding to Ireland and feckups at the hosting”

  1. Helen says:

    The find-syndicator.php script has been down for a few days – unless it has a cached query it tells you to ‘try again later’. As a matter of interest, why does it fail for some queries such as ‘London’ and points of the compass other than ‘east’?

  2. Helen says:

    The Geograph API and Nearby’s produce quite distinct results! The main problem with Geograph’s is that if there is more than one placename returned, it fails ‘unable to identify a unique location’. Although some of its search results come from the title or descriptive text rather than the location! In practice Nearby’s API produces a result far more often, and for my purposes I would rather have a link to the wrong place than to no place at all. Try a search on a few placenames such as ‘wick’ and you will see what I mean.