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1. I can’t tell you how much I wish today was April 1. This is an awful bit of news. While I’m sure they’ll find a way to recover, it takes a massive block of time that would be much better spent furthering the hobby rather than doing damage control. There’s a special place in hell for hackers who pull stunts like this.

2. First the demise of MS FS, now this. I know they are “competitors”, but AVSIM is an important part of FS history nonetheless …

3. JC.

   Unless I misread your post…what’s your problem?

   Tom’s sent out a news bulletin to the FS sites, which has been posted above. Can you see it includes a link to their temporary forum?

   Before you’re critical in future, I suggest you read what it is your being critical about, rather than just spouting random garbage.

4. We would like someone to explain the motive for hackers to
   destroy such a service.

5. Nick, you clearly DID misread my post. As much as I regret the demise of MS FS, I regret the factual destruction of AVSIM (in spite of the fact that I never was a regular at AVSIM and that AVSIM and simflight are [or were] in actual fact competitors). English isn’t my mother tongue, but I didn’t realize it was that bad ??????????????

6. JC. My apologies, I obviously read your post completely the wrong way. Gosh, don’t I now feel bad. Anybody have a ‘blushing’ smiley they can post here for me?

7. That’s OK, Nick. I goof up so often in life I could do with a blushing smiley myself. Francois, what are you waiting for 🙂

8. Now that the dust has settled a bit we have to look at Tom Allensworth and his site’s position in the FS community. We have to ask the difficult question of Tom why he chose with so much entrusted to him to use backup methods that were less secure. So many hated the idea of paying sites for file sharing but there’s a reason for it. Looking at sites like Flightsim.com who take the money and go through proper channels to properly protect data, the ends justifies the means. Responsibility has to be address but not hammered on. We all want Tom to rebuild Avsim but just the same it’s his fault alone for not properly protecting all of our work. Hackers are going to hack and many times are successful that’s why admins have to take precautions to protect things we can’t readily replace. It’s no different than real world flying, what you overlook can come back and kill you. In many cases the Pilot in Command is the one held responsible for the lives entrusted to him…

9. Dillon is right. As much as Avsim was useful, Tom Allensworth and the Avsim staff let down the entire flightsim community big time. They were entrusted with a lot of valuable files, articles, forum, etc. and our trust in them was not paid back. Thank goodness we do have other sites like FlightSim.Com, Simviation, etc. that seem to be run by responsible people. The other thing that should be learned from this is that freeware author should upload to more than one site; there were way too many who were giving Avsim exclusives and that sure turned out to be a lousy idea.

10. “Our trust in them was not paid back”

    What?

    Its ignorant people like you that spoil it for the rest of us!

11. Ignorant people who uploaded their often thousands of hours of work to a website trusting it was properly backed up?

    I have uploaded things to Avsim that I no longer have access to. Fortunately, I doubt anyone would want them any more, but I have yet to meet an IT professional who believes that a second online server is an adequate disaster recovery solution.

    Rightly or wrongly, a it could be claimed that Avsim (not Tom. He’s not the entire organisation) has been negligent with other peoples’ work and, potentially, advertisers’ money (they’re not getting any traffic from Avsim for their outlay right now). Personally, however, I would never expect a website to be around for ever and would never expect them to be solely reliable for safe storage of my work. It’s a pity if people have lost things, but they can’t blame Avsim for their own failure to back their files up!

12. Ian,

    Don’t get me wrong, I do sympathise with anyone that has spent countless hours uploading work only to find it disappear off the face of the earth.

    My comment was more related to what AllenM had written in its entirety. I felt it was a bit OTT.

    Sorry if I caused any offence.

    JP

13. No offence taken, JP – the stuff I’ve lost is a) ancient (around FS98 – 2000!) and not really worth bothering with. Anything I’ve uploaded since I have kept backups of! 😉

    Allen had a very valid comment in his post about the fact that a lot of – particularly freeware – developers insist on only uploading their files to one site. You may or may not have noticed a huge rush of AI files to another download site recently, because all their links went to Avsim and Avsim alone. Yet a repainter on a third site announced a short while ago that he had no interest in uploading any of his (excellent) paints for a new model until Avsim was back up and running.

    What I do disagree with in Allen’s post is the statement that other sites are run by “responsible people”. No website is immune to disaster. One of my friends a few years ago had an entire server suite blown out the window into a car park by a fuel depot exploding. That was pretty irrecoverable! You can’t restore files when not only are the servers in pieces, but so is the building that stored them. A little extreme as examples go, but it does prove the point that if you only upload to a single location, there’s no guarantee at all that your files will be there in an hour’s time, let alone tomorrow.

    And yes, I’m guilty as charged. All the silly little sceneries I make go up to my own site alone, so I can keep control over the versions of them. But I do keep offline backups! 🙂