The New & Improved BookMooch Down?? Thread

Of course, we will never, ever, not possibly use this thread ever again...

but since the last one was getting rather long....

Here's to hoping that we never need to use this thread again!!!

.... especially since BM is running slow this weekend!! **cough cough**

edited to add "THE LINK"

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.bookmooch.com

Talk about tempting fate Skittles ..... it looks like BM is down already.

well, it has been slow & then up&down since Friday....

and I added the very important link to down for everyone in the first post!

It's back (for me!)

It was up for me a few minutes ago.

Erg! I have a book to mark received :P

#@$*&!

It has gone down (again) and I have a heap of books to mark received!

*scowl*

Down again this a.m. (5/6 @ 7:30). :-(

Same here in France! I so wanted to mark my new books as 'received'... I'll wait - after all, they are all volunteers in BM, so I am going to cut them some slack and be patient. BookMooch is great.

Down, down down, down!
Still! :(

This new and improved thread doesn't work sk!

8:31 EDT-US it is still down.

Hey, Lman, I said the thread was new & improved, not the online status of BM!!!

although, it really seems to be up more frequently than it used to.... or is that my eternal optimism showing?

I was just thinking that it is down more often than before. It used to be weeks between instances, now it's days. Also, I'm checking my wishlist less often and mooching less, so I must miss some of the outages.

Yeah, but I was hoping it would...work on the site that is. *sigh*

Besides; when reading the topic and OP; it ain't hard to think that way.

It seems to be down a lot lately...ever since this thread in fact!
:p~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Still down...

yes, it is all my fault!!

I made this thread in anticipation of more outages!

I am the one responsible for BM being down.

I am responsible when BM is "up".

I am responsible for bad search results.

I may even be responsible when you can't find the book you want... because I got it before you!!

tee hee hee!!

just now, from the blog:

- - - - -

4h outage

There was a power outage at the server hosting company where BookMooch's server lives, and consequently BookMooch was unavailable for four hours today.

No data was lost, everything is fine, but I thought I'd let you know in case you were worried.

- - - - -

gee and I thought it was me!!?!!

Hell, we do rather rely on that electricity stuff these days, don't we?!

SK!
Leave that big switch alone!!!!

Yay, skittles turned Bookmooch on again!

*sigh* That's a relief! Where would I find my dose of *Books* otherwise? Oh, wait. LibraryThing. BM=getting books, LT=anything else book-related.

At least it's back now, I've been trying to slack off work all day and ended up having to actually study and do proper work instead of looking at books!

Got a bunch of books that I'm thinking I'll list tonight if I get a chance though.

Off again!

It was on long enough for me to mooch one book then down again.

Looks like it's back.

This is good.

is it just me or are other people getting blank pages at BM?

edited to add: Good Now.

>26 skittles:

It's not just you.

...aaargh!!! There's a wonderful book just sitting there (from a wonderful angel) and Bookmooch isn't letting me in to mooch it!

I'm glad it wasn't just me.

It let me in now -- I guess it was just a "blip".

one very weird blip!!

I'm not getting anything on Book Mooch just now, page has been sat loading for AGES!

#31: That sounds like the same behavior as last night, but it is loading for me right now.

Forever Loading or Down?

it was loading really really slowly this afternoon...

and now it isn't loading for me....

darn ..... socks!! that's what I'm doing..... darning socks!!

ETA: and now it is back up!!

and it better stay that way!!

Noooooooooooooo! BM is down!

Mare, I think it is "burping" because I'm not having problems...

but maybe I'm going to jinx it???? hopefully not

It's back up for me too, now. Figures the second I check dfeojm and post here, it comes back. lol

Mare, look at how many times I post and that same thing happens!!

I'd rather post here & find out I'm wrong, then not post & find out that it will be down for DAYS!!!!!

ARGGG no checking my wish list right now. I ALWAYS check my wish list first thing in the morning. ARGGG

Since there are no other posts, does that mean book mooch is not down now? I've been unable to get in since yesterday. Maybe this is a problem with my internet access.

Bookmooch is definitely not down right now. Good luck!

>39 alicemeg:

It's been up for me too, but you can always check here:

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bookmooch.com

at the down for everyone or just me? site.

"Connection refused" as of 5 minutes ago or so.

>42 bertilak:

It was down for me too, but now it's up again.

Just a "blip" I hope.

Yes, but it's pretty slow. I wonder why 4 PM EDT would be a peak load time?

I experienced downgraded speed and performance last night while searching. Simple searches that should take nanoseconds were taking minutes. Have not tried today but sounds like the issue still abounds. Jon probably needs to either restart the services or the servers to clean out the garbage collectors and refresh everything.

Not down so much as really really really s l o w. anyone else?

Down completely for me :(

It's down for Downforeveryoneorjustme as well.

Well I guess that means I don't have any more excuses... off to pick up the yard from a wicked thunderstorm last night. I get to learn how to use a chainsaw! (which is as scary as it sounds...)

Yep, I have company coming tomorrow, got to get the house work done. sigh. I hate it when my favourite procrastination tool is unavailable.

Hopefully it comes back up soon!

looks like it is still down at this time...

BM's back (well for me anyway!)

yeah; it is working again!

BM not working for me today (1pm GMT) - not loading in either firefox or chrome. Anyone else?

>55 readingwithtea:

It's down for me too, Cricketgirl, and the "Down for everyone or just me?" site confirms it.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bookmooch.com

Hmph. Just when I've done a book re-arrangement and found 5 books to add to inventory! Thanks for letting me know.

It's working now -- but very s l o w l y !

This morning, when I went to my Google Reader, there were 60+ blog posts from BookMooch!

I think something broke!

heh... been away from the computer for a bit, sounds like I missed lots of frustration! :P

Is bookmooch down for anyone else right now?

down for me, too

oh good it is not just me; had an issue for the past hour trying to get on...really can't complain when the site is free :)

Yup been down for a while for me too. Considering the pile of ironing I had to do, I figured it was a sign...

edit: It's been down for over 2 hours now. This cannot be a good thing.

I have started to twitch from the length of this downage. Someone needs to start a 12 step program.

I just got home from a weekend of NO INTERNET!!

I'm frantically checking email, news, & my booksites....

got notified of a bunch of wishlists, realize there's not a chance that they are still available, but.....

I can't get on BM!!!

**SOB**

skittles
Stay positive - they just may be...
xx

Ironing is done, office is cleaner than it has ever been, and still no BM.

The length of this outage is making me nervous....

Must be one of those days.. bm is still down....3 hours later and Kohls is also down..well that front page is up by when you actually conduct a search the site is down....guess today is not my day; think i will go read more of my book instead.

I'm up much too late... want to check BM, but no BM to check!!

wish there was a way to get a status update!

As of 11:30 EST still no BM :( I'm glad I addressed my packages already.

I know I'm not missing anything because no one else can list or mooch books either, but knowing it intellectually means nothing to my compulsive side.

lol same here, macsbrains. I know no one else can mooch right now either, but I'm still going "nooooo I might miss something!"

Still down!! Arg! :P

*beats head on desk*

I agree, Mare. This is making me nervous... Eight hours by this point?

Blog is down too. Any word Mark?

At least nine hours, Orangewords. My first attempt was at 2pm my time and its now past 11.

I haven't seen Mark on here in ages, but I hope that if this continues for much longer that we could get an update. It is quite concerning that it is still down.

I am so glad I have half of my packages addressed already, but that's half of about 20. This is making me very nervous as well.

Still down!

It's been down all day for me, wow, just when I got a lot of ex-library books to list! Ah well, it can wait ...

Annnd still down. Time to call it a night! Night all!

I'm hoping we'll get a blog post when it finally comes back up, explaining what happened. *also hopes no data/mooches are lost*

it is after 3am & BM is still down.

Of course, if I wake in the night, I will still check BM, even if I am barely coherent & not sitting up correctly & still in bed.

and, no I am not addicted.... no really I'm not... really really not addicted... promise.... not addicted... really, truly!!

Why doesn't anyone believe me?????? **whine**

What are you doing awake at 3am??

Well I work nights, and even though I'm off tonight, I find it far too difficult to switch my body back and forth. So I'll be up for hours yet.

Still no BM... almost 12 hours by this point. I'm sending good luck thoughts to those involved with trying to fix this!

And still down... :(

Still down? I have 3 books to mail. They're wrapped up ready to go, but I need the names/addresses! I don't save the e-mails any more.

The BM website seems to be down again - if official announcements were to be made about it, I guess I'd rather prefer the BM blog to be on a different server, because it is also down! :-)

Well I'm heading to bed... still no BM :(

It is annoying the site is still down going on over 16 hours now but at least we are not paying a monthly fee for the service. For the most part the site is free. Hopefully the site comes back up soon but sadly people will leave BM over these types of issues.

Where is BM based?

Boooo, just got home from work and it's still not working!

Yep. Still down.

For those who are looking for addresses: The address is in the mooch request email. I hope BM is coming back!

I checked the cached version of the blog and see no announcement. I was wondering if it was smart to move the blog, since both would go down at once. Here is hoping they are well on their way now :)

@96 - I agree, the blog should have been kept separate, as we don't have any way of knowing how things are going. At least we wouldn't have to worry unnecessarily if we *know* that things are being dealt with.

#95: not everyone keeps the emails... including the person who posted that needs BM up to get those addresses.

BM is based in California for those wondering; but Jon could be in England or other places.

If the servers actually need a cold restart then hopefully someone is around and can do it. Usually restarting the service (which can be done remote) clears up most issues. The fact the site is still down after 20 hours means either the connection to the host is broken, the internet tunnel line is down (I have seen lines get physically cut before--by mistake) and unless you have a backup line somehow; you are totally down or the site crashed and no one is there to restart the service, hardward died and waiting for replacement parts or the old possiblity of we don't know why it went down and are trying to figure it out still.

Probably could use problem mgmt and a post mortem on this issue once it is resolved to prevent this type of issue again :)

It's up!!!!

Whoopee!

*happy dance*

Yay!

Well, I missed my WL book, but got 2 angel mooch books for someone else.

Yay!!

Hmmm... missed 1 WL book I've been after for a while but at least it's back.

..... Anyone else find it really frustrating that there is no blog post about the HUGE downtime? I mean, even if John is away, there is no reason an Admin couldn't post about it. For it to be down for so long and have no explanation when it finally comes back up.... That frustrates me.

Not bothered. It's up again, all appears fine. Back to listing! :)

@107 I agree, Heather. I guess I just more-so want to know whether it was a fluke or not and whether it may happen again! But I'm a bit too addicted to bookmooch, so the fact that it drove me nuts to have it gone for so long is probably something I should take steps to deal with before worrying about the stability of the site... haha.

@ 107 and @ 109; I agree totally a free site or not (not free if you donate money) being down for over 20 hours without an explaination is poor net communication and will drive many people away from using the site. There are several valid reasons as to what might have happened--and I was serious in my last post about wires being cut..happened at my office once, the street workers cut the cables in the street losing internet access to a large number of compaines. The comapny I work at has back up severs and lines in other locations so the company site stayed up but that would not be true for a company like bookmooch.

Probably should go post this on the BM internal forums--John's blog to hopefully get a response. 20 hours with no explination makes me want to seriously look at using BM in the future. How can I not trust the next outage could be days or longer and with money tied up in those points--money to ship books, I prefer some reassurance in the steps being taken to prevent this from occurring in the future.

I know of another free site where it has been down for several days at a time. There's no way of knowing what happened when it does come back up each time, so no point stressing over it. Sure it would be nice to know what happened with BookMooch, but if there's no data loss or problems other than being down, then there's probably no point posting about it, or getting frustrated when there's more important things to think about. Try being positive?

I think I understand the frustration on this one. In the past, John's been rather open about the reasons behind any downtime. As well, we have been spoiled with Mark's posting on this thread. Mark's been absent since the 3point/ratio screw-ups and this time John hasn't posted anything either. So we have always been blessed with information, and to suddenly stop that is, well, frustrating.

With the three point change, along with other changes, it has made some loyal people question the integrity of the site. When we send out books for points, we are investing in those points, so we have a vested intrest in keeping the site running. Many ppl also give a little, which furthers that investment. I can understand why people are nervous and wish to hear some communication about the well-being of the site. The site itself may be free, but our usage of it is most certainly not.

I agree.. While I understand it is a free site I would appreciate communication and don't devalue the opinions of those who are upset at the lack of communication. I agree with 112, I can definitely see why this would make people nervous. Despite being a 'free' site you pay investment into the points you use, so you do stand to loose money if the site goes down.

Which is a good reason to keep one's number of points low. While I think that BM will be around a while, I find that it removes some of the stress from unexplained outages or arbitrary changes when I don't have a big financial investment.

The site does show a tendency to only go down when I have books to add or mark as mailed!

That's true. It is an expensive hobby! :)

The outage was annoying for me, but as it happened during a holiday weekend (Labor Day in the US) I figured that the people who would bring it back up were on vacation. No big deal; I don't pay for the site so I can't get too angry about extended downtime. It's just a hobby for me.

I remember when we had a thread on 'how many points to you keep on hand' and we were discussing how below a certain number of points we felt the need to post more books to get points (30 for some, more for others). Now it has changed more to a 'How many points do you feel safe stockpiling?'

I'm up to 250 points and I just can't spend them! Most vexing.

>118 readingwithtea: That's how I feel, too! I went digging through the listed books last night just looking for random stuff to spend points on, but I was also thinking about how I have so. many. books. that I've ALREADY gotten through BM that unless it's on my wishlist do I NEED to add even more random stuff that I will never read in a lifetime?

And the browsing, oh, it is painful. That really needs to be one of the next things improved.

**sob**

trying to clean up my pending.... and it BROKE!!!

**sob**

ETA: looks like it just burped....

**whew!!**

Glad it was a small one! (I missed it!)

ps- Must be quite some pending Skittles!

Is BM running slow for anyone else today. I simple book search of an ISBN or a title is taking several minutes to come back; I hope the site does not go down.

I tend to find a BookMooch search alone takes a lot longer, than clicking browse on BookMooch and searching Amazon via BookMooch.

I search via Amazon too, bookel. Works quickly.

The point is I should not have to go to another site when attempting to use this site. It seems this is a known issue and should be on John's list to fix. The job of a website is to make our lives eaiser not to force workarounds. I know anyone could then argue well the site is free but techincally people donate to it--so no it is not totally free and the bigger concern is people will leave over things like this.

It is searching amazon via BookMooch. The whole browse/search feature on BookMooch itself needs fixing. Not having search results display by alphabetical author was a mistake for one thing. It looks a mess.

Agree, bookel, it's a total mess. You can look for a book by title and not find it, then search by author and it shows up. Or you can look both ways, not find it, then search via Amazon within Bookmooch and there it is.

Frustrating.

**pout**

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://bookmooch.com/m/

Oh good, I was just coming over to report that BM was down again...

Seems like its been happening a lot more recently with really no explanation as to why.

Apparently back up here.

Also up here!

This was a little different if i type the url into my webbrowser I got server taking to long to respond error. If i clicked on this link which said the page was up and from that page clicked on the BM Link i got into the site.....love internet errors

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://bookmooch.com/m/

I am in the process of importing my wishlist into LT. I've been resisting that because of issues with adding the books eventually, and it inflates the numbers & books for ER, etc. But I simply do not trust the BM site anymore and I *don't* want to lose my massive wishlist.

It's causing some issues with my collections, but I should hopefully be able to do some mass edits and get that cleared up quickly.

Dang...I spoke to soon BM is down... even according to the site link above...

I think it's back up again...

Mare, during the last great BM upheaval I copied my wishlist into an off the internet list on my laptop. It's a pain to update two lists (three if you include my PBS list), but I feel more secure that I won't wake up one morning to find it gone. There are a few years now of books on there and I'd hate to lose it. Especially since there are some authors whose titles I mix up and I don't want to pass on a book I haven't read or pick up a duplicate (guess which one I do most often?).

I haven't put my wishlist on LT for the reasons you've mentioned, and I love entering a new book into the system here too much. But I agree that it's a good idea to not have you wishlist just on BM.

134> ERG, YES. There is something funky with the import that completely wrecks my collections EVERY TIME. This has been a problem for a long time - perhaps I should open a bug report?

To minimize damage I suggest that you should make sure you tag your new imports with a highly visible (i.e. ALL CAPS) unique tag, and wait a couple of days before you try power edit any collection mistakes. If you try to fix them too soon it makes it worse and sometimes things get lost in the void.

>137 RidgewayGirl: when you say copy; please tell me you are using the export feature on your wishlist. On a PC (I don't own an apple) the file opens in notepad. You can then save an import to excel, access or a number of other programs.

Down again?

And now it's down for me, although downforeveryoneorjustme says it's just me :(

Same here, so maybe it's just us? :) I can also ping it, for all the good it does me.

I can't get in either -- got as far as the login page once.

It's up now, but very slow.

Why not alphabetize the wishlist and manually add each one to LT (in case you have multiple editions listed by title)? I did it manually and did not use the import wishlist (wouldn't use it if it has problems like you describe).

Perhaps because I have nearly 1,700 hard to find books on my wishlist?

Works for me, so I saved a copy on my computer. I had not done so since February(?) or so, so thank you for the reminder. I was glad to see I could import it into excel and have done so :)
Thanks!

ps- Up for me here!

Shrug. I had a lot more than that when I originally did my LT wishlist.

You have more patience than I then :P

138: I had tagged the whole group with "Wishlist", so that did help quite a bit in the end. I wish my collections didn't go quite so odd, but in the end, it wasn't that hard to sort it out. My wishlist seems to be short a few books from BM, but I have multiple editions on BM so I am assuming that's where they went. And seeing as there is only 25 or so missing, I'm not going to cross reference 1300 books.

The only other thing I had thought to do was perhaps start a new wishlist-only LT account.

149 - Yeah, the tagging is a must, especially for a large wishlist. The problem I usually have (besides it completly doing whatever it wants to my collections in the first place, even if I make a special collection specifically for the import) is that sometimes my edits to the collections don't stick immediately after the import, so I'll try it again, and it still won't stick, and then it'll do something totally crazy and I'll go batty. (Let's not even get into trying to delete duplicate works from the related editions...). I have noticed that if I give it time to settle, (i.e. give up in frustration) I stop having the problems the next day (or however much time proportionate to the size of my import list.) I just can never wait that long.

I didn't move my wishlist to LT until collections came out so I could keep them separate. I don't really like inflating my numbers, but I really do love having the purple checkmarks come up as I go through the site. Sometimes I'll look up a book and see that I have every recommended book already on my wishlist. You lose that easy functionality if you put them into a separate account. Plus I also allow recommendations for that collection so the suggestions expand one step further. It's something to keep in mind.

BM has been down for at least 30 min so far; hopefully it comes back soon

Down, AGAIN?!?!?!

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.bookmooch.com

maybe someone else wants to give it a try? for me it is still down

Yeah - me too

I can't ping it. Looks like it's not just us.

**SOB**

still down!!

I managed to mark a couple of books received, but it was running really slow. Now its back down :(

It's up for me.

It is back for me now, too!!

**happy dance**

it is up and down for me still....bummer

Up and down for me too.

not down, but r e a l l y r e a l l y slow

s o s l o w.

slow all morning and now D O w n.

Grr yeah super slow. My husband is watching the baby and this is my chance to give the site my undivided attention. I've got a bunch of books to mark received and post, and it's much more of a pain when I've got to tend to the baby who wants my full attention. :/

Sloooow! Glad it is not just me, I was worried the university wireless was on the fritz again :P

it would be nice if John would address these issues and what he is doing to resolve them. It is getting tired of not hearing the root cause or steps taken to fix these issues. We used to be a community now it seems as if BM is losing interest in the community.

I think that the idea of "community" was blown to shreds when Buckman peevishly informed us that he does not read member comments, and does not take anyone's opinions into consideration outside of a few, hand-picked lackeys.

But a brief comment on why BM is going down so often would be reassuring without challenging his authority.

We are just spoiled here at LT. Tim lets us know almost everything! Tim communicates with us.

and when LT is down, he & the gang/crew give estimates for when the site will be back up... to the best of their knowledge & ability to prognosticate.

Some people aren't as used to communicating about what is happening... or they don't want to communicate... or they can't.

It was running pretty slowly last night too. At one point, I warmed up my Keurig, made myself a cup of tea, came back and my page still hadn't loaded. Oddly enough, once I clicked refresh the page loaded really quickly. I managed to get what I had wanted to do done, but it seriously took forever!

THankfully usually when I am checking things on BM I am procrastinating, so I can just leave it trying to contact the site while I work. I also check about 1/20th of the amount that I did before the price increase, so that helps too :P

My point was that John used to tell us what caused the issues and how they were being fixed. Lately not heard a word.

most companies when having an outage; explain afterwards especially when the site is down for hours. John has not said a word lately.

I wonder what changed?

Hopefully he just busy and is not ill.

My personal opinion is that he is worried that any attempt at communication will be seen as an opportunity to create a dialogue. And he knows that people are not happy. He knows that the three month assessment looks not only bad but downright grim. Therefore I do not think he will post about anything until either he has made up his mind what to do one way or the other, or he absolutely has to. To be forced to say 'Yes the three month assessment shows that things are substantially worse but I am keeping it anyway' is not something he wants.

You have got to be kidding me. Down AGAIN?

Nvm. By the time I posted this, it's back up. But still...

Is anyone else finding that emails for mooch requests, (getting emailed when someone mooches a book from your inventory), are being delayed more than usual?

It's down again

It's back!

It's out.... for a bit.... not a hiccup... hopefully

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bookmooch.com

Thank you for this thread and the link -- wasn't sure what to think, then I remembered to check here. ;)

Sure has been down a lot lately :(

1 book to receipt, 1 book to send, expecting on a couple of 'ask first' responses...

Still down!

Hours.... *sulk*

Still down!!

Thank goodness I kept the e-mail request from a woman in SC so I could mail out her 3 books today! I had gotten in the habit of deleting the e-mails as soon as I saw them because I hadn't had problems getting into BM, but now I'll make sure I keep them until I actually mail books.

At least with LT you can get to a page that says they know it's down and sometimes there's even a time estimate of when it will be back up.

For some reason I have a bad feeling about this, I don't know why. I hope I'm wrong and that the site is back up soon and John gives us an explanation.

185> I was thinking the same thing. I have a bad feeling about it as well.

Yes, quite worrying, what with my around 300 unspent points. Luckily I don't have any books to mail at the moment.

At a time where my BM loyalty is at an all time low, I find these frequent, unexplained outages disturbing.

I would be very very displeased if the site disappeared suddenly, but I think I would survive. I would keep sending books to Books for Keeps, and I would still send out the angel mooches I have pending. I am really happy with all of the great transactions I have had. It sucks to have a lot of points unspent, but I think at this point I would survive and not freak out too much :)

Well, the longer it stays down, the more people it will inconvenience. We may complain, but we're not the ones who will walk away.

I just received a ginormous box from rainbowgirl and am itching to open it. I also want to open it without offspring involvement, which gives me exactly an hour and half for the site to reopen. Otherwise, it's Monday sometime.

At least with the length of the outage, there will certainly be an explanation for the repeated down-times.

190> "At least with the length of the outage, there will certainly be an explanation for the repeated down-times."

One would think, but I wouldn't bet on it.

And if there isn't, let's all go over to the BM forums and ask. It can't hurt.

My DTs haven't set in yet. Your mileage may vary.

I'm thinking good thoughts for BookMooch.

The outage started last night just before 9 pm California time (where the server(s) are located). It's obviously more serious than a "reboot the server" problem. It seems longer for us, but if they waited until this morning to start working on the problem, it hasn't been that long (it is now only lunchtime in California). If a hard drive died, they need time to replace the drive, and then restore the large BookMooch database from backup, and that will take a while. If the server died, it may take time to find/purchase/configure a replacement server. Hopefully it isn't something more vexing, like a spat with the ISP, or a corrupted database, etc.

Or maybe it was the BBB ? One customer complaint, and they knock BookMooch offline? Who knew those guys were packing such heat? Just kidding...

I like BM. I like the books. I like the international aspect of it. If it disappeared, I would cry. Then I would stop.

I would keep my BM friends, but I would still have PBS for books. I am fortunate.

Surprisingly enough, I don't have any PBS friends except the ones I met via LT & this group!

I hope that BM comes back online for the sake of my friends.

I will survive.

*cue the Gloria Gaynor song*

Still down......

I love BookMooch. No other site has given me as many books to enjoy for the simple act of swapping them. I have 2 requests that I wanted to honor today since it was trip-to-the-post-office day. Oh well.

There's not much alternative here in Australia as most of the US-based sites don't operate internationally. There is a newish Australian book swapping site but so far it has limited inventory and membership and it's very much a black box environment.

The thing that concerns me most about the lack of explanation for these extended outages is it's more reason for people to keep their points low and inventories small and the range of books available gradually becomes narrower.

I decided to check the BookMooch twitter account

http://twitter.com/#!/bookmooch

the last "tweet" was 22 hours ago.... when BookMooch went offline.

Still down. I am beginning to worry.

I'm beginning to worry too. I tried to log in this morning, wasn't working, didn't think much about it then. Now that I'm back from work I realize that the problem has been going on for a lot longer than just this morning.

For all my occasional annoyances with the site, I love it and I hope it comes back soon

Wow; we are at 200 items for this post..when do you make a new thread :( and the fact one needs to be made is sad :(

Hope it comes back soon.

This thread doesn't have to be restarted at 200 because the posts are so short....

but we can start an new thread once BM is online for a couple of days.... when it will be safe(?) to do so.

Hold out hope, my BM friends... keep holding onto hope!!!

Still down? Wow. I hope everything's okay...

24 hours....

do we want to start placing bets on when BM will return?

correct guesser gets smooches from others??

Well, we know John operates the site largely because it makes him feel good. Maybe the BBB thing was the final straw and he decided to throw in the towel and disappear? He's been MIA for several months now. Clearly his changes to the site did not have the desired effect. He wants bookmooch to grow, and it wasn't, it was shrinking. He didn't like that people didn't like his changes and disagreed with him.

My experience is that he likes to be right. Have we ever seen him admit that he was wrong about anything? Maybe he just got tired of all this and has decided to call it quits.

I really hope _I_ am wrong!!!

I will say, I like that Bookmooch emails come to my inbox. When PaperBackSwap goes down (rare!), I would be unable to do anything or communicate with anyone. When Bookmooch goes down, I can still send out any pending mooches, and can personally email people to let them know I got their book... which is better than just disappearing completely!

>205 rainbowgirl28: Actually, I'm wondering if something might not have happened before the BBB thing. I went to check the BBB website. There has been 3 complains about Bookmooch in the last 3 years. Only this latest one has had no reply and it was closed on October 31st. It feels like if this had been an emotional reaction to the whole BBB situation, the site would have stopped working earlier.

That said, the site being down for 24h, the no reply to the BBB complain, the fact that we haven't heard from John in a while does worry me.

This is one of those times where I really miss the blog being separate from the forums.

John's logged in within the past few weeks, at least. There's a book on his UK account that has been vaguely taunting me (not enough for me to get an angel) so I think I looked at that profile last week or something like.

Just when I was finally settling down enough to mooch some of my wishlisted books that had popped up!

I don't know much about John but I can't imagine he would intentionally bring down the site in response to the latest little rant. It's less than ideal and possibly not helpful to the site when outages like this go unexplained but I think we need to be patient and try to avoid frightening the horses.

I made my weekly mail pick-up today and am itching to mark books as received! There was a time in the recent past when the site was down for 24+ hours and came back up, so I'm not quite as worried as I was the first time. (Probably I should be more worried, but...)

I just hope he's okay. I know if I were responsible for the site and it had been down this long, I'd be a mess...

It probably isn't fun, whatever the reason. :(

*groans* Well, this explains why I haven't gotten any BM requests/sent-notices/etc....

Last time it was down for a long time, John didn't even bother with an explanation-blogpost. I won't hold my breath for one this time.

I have a few more points on bm, but I've transferred most of them to pbs. A friend on bm alerted me a few months ago that the site was shrinking and John was awol a lot, so she suggested it. I really hope it will come back up, because it serves a purpose internationally, and I've gotten a lot of books on it, as well as sent out almost 300 books. I'm down to under 15 points now, starting at 130 6 months ago.

Sigh. This latest outage has been illuminating, for me at least.

Normally, about this time, I am going crazy, unable to check the site, even quickly between doing other things. I am finding this time that I am not as worried about it, and am in fact, not concerned for me. I am concerned for my friends, and countless others who have many points saved up, or cannot use the USA only sites. With restricting the amount of books I have been posting on BM, I have been rediscovering my local used book stores (and gathering several WL items there!). I still enjoy the site, but I don't have as much invested in it as I used to. I am also finding fewer and fewer books on BM that I can mooch without angel intervention and that doesn't sit well with me.

For the past few outages, there has not been any explaination afterword. I am not expecting one this time.

Well, a mass email would be nice, letting everyone know what's happening. I have a bm friend who has over 100 points saved up, which represent real dollars spent in postage for books she has sent out. She's a little freaked out. But, we'll all survive if bm shuts down. The point system, I admit, had me baffled from the first. There are many points that are "empty" - that is, with no books behind them. That doesn't make a very good business model.

Does anyone know what John's server setup is for BookMooch? I remember reading once that he was running the AOLserver with some custom C code on a dedicated server and thinking that was a pretty exotic/unusual configuration. The AOLserver was innovative back when AOL is was a big company, but now it's pretty outdated and could have security issues. Also hardly anyone programs websites in C anymore. I wonder if the whole system hasn't become hard to maintain. Anyway, I hope the site does come back up soon and I agree with the other posters about better updates on the outages...

I've been walking a tightrope between having a bunch of points I want to spend and not having any room to put them when I get them. I also haven't printed out my wishlists lately, and I'd hate to lose them too. I was thinking of adding them here on LT, but that would be so much work. Maybe sometime I'll check the techie threads about importing lists to LT. Right now I'll just wait and see.

Breaking news: it's back! I just marked a book which I mailed yesterday as sent.

Well, it was up for 2 minutes. It's is now 'The server at bookmooch.com is taking too long to respond'.

Could be they are bringing the site up gradually.

Yes, it's back again and seems stable.

Please excuse me as I stop obsessing and get on with my life ...

and John posted about it:

BM was down for a day
BookMooch was unavailable for about 30 hours.

The problem was caused by the operating system going "splat" for reasons I haven't yet figured out.

So... I had to reinstall the operating system and reconfigure the machine to run BookMooch.

Everything looks like it's working fine, and there was no data loss.

If you do see something not working right, please post a comment below and I'll get on it right away.

-john

Hooray it's back and there's even a blog post!

..... I'm not in the position to sing BM's praises, but the fact that John blogged about the downtime makes me feel LOADS better. When a significant downtime happens with no word from the owner afterwards, it feels like he just doesn't care, which isn't a good feeling. So, yay for blogpost!

My concern is over what he is saying is the outage.

"So... I had to reinstall the operating system and reconfigure the machine to run BookMooch."

Is he really claiming there is "1 computer" for all of bookmooch; that he does not have a two computers running bookmoch at all times? even with backups...a one computer shop these days is not really OK in my book.

#224 - If I remember correctly from other posts discussing server purchases a few years back, There are a couple of servers running the show, but , I suspect that the main server that handles all incoming requests went down, which shut down the site.

Is anyone else having problems again with BM????

Well, not quite out of the woods yet. Most pages on Bookmooch right now result in this: The requested URL cannot be accessed due to a system error on this server.

Ok, just wanted to make sure it wasn't just me. Everything was fine and I got to mail out some books. Went back on and was getting error messages. Thanks for replying so I know I'm not crazy :o)

My friend just called and asked me if BM was down again. I checked and i get either blank pages or the above mentioned error.

OK... BookMooch seems stable and online....

and this thread is 200+

so, I'm closing the thread & I've started a new one that we all hope will never be needed....

NEW THREAD HERE: http://www.librarything.com/topic/126358

THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED!!!!

THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED!!!!

THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED!!!!

THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED!!!!

Is bookmooch down? I can't get the pages to load, and down for everyone appears not to like me today... Can anybody else get on?

I can now get the wishlist up, but nothing else?

BookMooch was running slowly for me yesterday and today is even slower. Is anyone else experiencing this?

I usually find it to be pretty slow. I assume this is a financial server- either the bandwidth or the server just can't handle much traffic.

Odd, it's running well for me, except the "complex" searches which have always tended to be a bit slow, so I usually do only ISBN ones which work fine.

It's been running really slow for me the last few days, much more so than usual. For whatever that's worth :-p

I haven't noticed any slowness myself, at least outside of asking the system to show me something huge (such as the Points analysis All+ option for ridiculously active members).

I found it very slow last night when I was loading some wishlists.

Friend asked me this morning the following: Only the browse / search bookmooch feature results are doing the following. When you search for a book and the results return the buttons are in Italian? not English. The rest of the site features are in English.

1. Anyone else getting weird behavior
2. Where are the language settings?

The Italian thing is an old bug.

I've been finding it extremely slow to load wishlists lately also

At 12:10 Central,
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bookmooch.com
reported "It's not just you! http://bookmooch.com looks down from here."

nevermind, it's back up.

ssslllloooowwww!

Is it down or is it me? I've not been able to get on all day.

> 245, this time, it's you.

I went to get my mooch on and it appears to be not working at all.

Down for me, too.

ok - I don't feel so bad now - it's not just me.

And it's still down.

Me, too :~{

Down for me since 8:00 EST and still down at 2:30 EST.

Noticed this myself earlier this morning. Had a couple books sent from England earlier today, I am glad it was up for that at least!

Does anyone else get nervous when bookmooch has been down for a bit and start worrying about their pile of "unspent" points just sitting there. Don't get me wrong, I've gotten over 1500 books through BM since I started but I sure would be sad to see it go away for good.

I know. I'd like to at least copy my wishlist. I have a hard copy, but haven't updated it in a while. Guess that gives me a project this evening : )

Isn't there another news site for them where they usually post what's happening? The blog appears to be down too.

Good idea on backing up the wishlist.. I have been adding to it over the holidays ;)

Glad this is here. It means I can relax, quit cursing my personal computer and quit attempting to log in to bookmooch every 10 minutes. Sigh. & I'm in a mooching mood too. ;)

I made a non-bookmooch when the points bro-ha-ha was going on and BM suddenly felt less than permanent. The problem is that I can go months between upgrades.

Glad I could check here...got a couple of books in the mail today and I wanted to mark them recieved. I'm still waiting on books that were suppose to have been sent in August and September. I'm thinking I'm going to mark them lost they both should have arrived by now as the book i just recieved came from overseas and arrived in like 2 weeks. *sigh*

I haven't printed put my wish lists in a while either. You're right, Kay, I should think about doing that again. I'd hate to lose those. I was think of switching my lists into LT, but that would be a lot of work.

I just finished a massive wish list update over Christmas... Had to cross reference my list on LT with the one on BM to ensure I didn't have any purchased books left on one. The goal was to get it finished so that I could enjoy the Boxing Day sales but sadly I didn't get done in time.

Not working for me today...

Back up!