About Loyalty - über Loyalität

[Olham 164]

Yes, I thought it was a total knock-out, Dave - I am sure, you would have given a sign otherwise.

 

I guess there may be - despite all security measures - still possible safety risks in a place,

which is so open and easy to use as CA ?

The more comfortable for the users, the more risks of attacks, I guess?

[+Dave 2,322]

Yes, I thought it was a total knock-out, Dave - I am sure, you would have given a sign otherwise.

 

I guess there may be - despite all security measures - still possible safety risks in a place,

which is so open and easy to use as CA ?

The more comfortable for the users, the more risks of attacks, I guess?

 

 

No, what I think happen was our host provider was doing updates and knocked us off the net. Then didnt realize it until sometime later.

[Baldric 42]

I've been a member of the SimHQ forums for awhile and it was through a friend there and Polovski's posts at SimHQ that led me to discover the joys of OFF. I'm hardly active as a poster there (or here for that matter the last while), mainly just reading to get an idea as to what is going on with my favourite air sims, what new mods may be out and so on. I personally have no concerns as to where the official OBD forums are located as I don't imagine we'll be lacking for information here on CA anyway. By the way, it was nice seeing a lot of the familiar names from here posting there too.

[Flyby PC 23]

I believe you Dave, absolutely. Circumstances do conspire against us and it really is unfair sometimes, but in the same breath, the OBD guys could only act on the information they had. I too thought a forum going offline and corresponding failure in supporting emails was unusual. Personally, I suspected either ill health or family disaster was a factor, (I'm glad it wasn't that Dave), or a disgruntled ex-wife changing all the passwords.

 

 

It's happened, it's done, and we'll all know better next time.

 

 

 

Truth be known, and please don't pick up on it guys, I really don't want this issue to fester, my personal opinon is the OBD guys could have made change to SimHQ a provisional contingency arrangement until it became clear what had happened to the CA forum. I'm not saying they were hasty in coming to their judgement, nor am I saying they were wrong in the judgement they came to, but I am left wondering quietly why it had to be such a permanent move straight out the trap. Personally, and it is just my personal opinion, I'd have liked to have known more before making that particular call, (just in case it was a family tragedy). CA is and has been very good to us.

 

Now the OBD guys perhaps had issues and discussions I'm unware of, and it's quite possible knowing the same things, I'd have come to their exact conclusions. We can speculate on whether there were other factors involved. To an extent, the CA forum was already established, and who's to say launching into a different forum doesn't usher in a whole new wave of people and potential customers. There is a product release heading our way gents...

 

I don't know fellas. I'm sad at what's happened, but if we don't lose our heads, we can see how things develop going forward. In the meantime we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down, keep a stiff upper lip and carry on....

[OlPaint01 0]

@Dave

 

An after-action-report from your host provider would be an interesting read. The tracert that I performed from my location on the Internet showed that either a backbone router or boarder router on Time Warner's Network (RoadRunner) was failing and timed-out without returning a PING. I personally opened a trouble ticket with RR to report that this particular router was down. I don't know if that did any good but it gave me satisfaction that I may have contributed to the service restoration.

 

OlPaint

Edited May 26, 2012 by OlPaint01

[+MK2 12]

Guys , I love the passion ! And again I am truly sorry about what occured. Regardless this forum is not going anywhere so feel free to kick back and continue to make it your own. It's not really a competition between us and anyone else. It's really about making sure we all collectively promote a great product like OFF.

 

At the end of the day this forum provides a service that few others do on this level , which is to preserve the work of skinners and modders . The files are here, download and enjoy them . No one else can claim that, so there will always be a place for Combat Ace regardless of any circumstance .

[Olham 164]

Well said, MK2 - yes, the service and convenience here is first class, no doubt!

[Herr Prop-Wasche 7]

Thanks, MK2.

 

I always have, and will continue to enjoy my stay at CA. It just feels like home.

[+Erik 1,812]

Everyone -

 

I'm horrified after reading this. I owe you all an explanation and hopefully a reason to stay not to go.

 

I want everyone to know my official position is to have the entire membership of OFF to remain here, regardless of any changes or "official" forum. To me this is the home for OFF and always will be. I'm horrified that my personal life invaded the OFF community, it's members and collectively community decisions. That said here is the back story.

 

From the site stand point one of the many things I'm responsible for is hardware. Sometime back in January I started planning to upgrade our storage capacity namely hard drive storage. Just like your machines at home one of the definitive hard limits is how much we can physically store and with a site like this where files and content are added almost every second of the day our storage needs continue to grow. I monitor our equipment daily and plan for these variables it's part of what I do and the decisions are mine. The way our equipment works adding physical hard drive space isn't a matter of slapping in a new drive and moving on. We have the responsibility of redundancy, accessibility for speed, and long term storage. Hence any changes to our RAID configuration takes planning and poise.

 

The above in mind I planned the upgrade for May based on my work load and schedule. I started all the backups and moving of crucial data to my home work stations and had our data center fire up a new machine for our migration. The tentative schedule was to have everything moved by the 10th of May and the new machine was scheduled with the data center to go live then. I asked for the DNS migration to go into effect based on my schedule of how long it should take and where I was in the process and moved on. This isn't the first time I've done this and most of the time migrations and changes go off with little to no problems and are often something you guys ever notice.

 

On May 6th sometime near the 11:00 PM hour local time I arrived at the University Medical Center Emergency Room. Twenty minutes later I was in cardiac arrest from a pulmonary embolism that blocked the circulation to and exchange of oxygen with my lungs. I was officially in cardiac arrest for 45 minutes and coded 4 times while the great folks in the emergency department worked on me. During this episode of events I was iced and incubated into a medically induced coma followed by life support on ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation). I remained on ECMO for two weeks and drug induced in a coma while my body healed. ECMO is usually reserved for younger people and was a last ditch effort in saving my life. So there I was and I have no memory of any of it.

 

Waking up happened somewhere in May. My family was told that I had a 20% chance of surviving what happened to me and a less than 5% chance that I'd be a functioning adult afterwards. The fear was that due to the extreme distress I underwent that I'd have a mental or physical handicap as a result of the prolonged arrest, lack of oxygen, subsequent incubation, or transfer to ECMO. Regardless of any of this my life and what was happening at CombatACE continued forward. I didn't and couldn't communicate with the data center to let them know to stop what I had already started. My family who was in preservation mode didn't know to call someone about it and nobody had access to my email account which for most people are private anyway. Even if they had known what was going on with CombatACE there is nothing they could have done. We didn't go offline over something simple. Someone would have had to have known that I requested our DNS migration already and they simply wouldn't have known that. When the DNS request finally went into effect it pointed our domain to equipment that was essentially new and empty. We were officially offline at that point.

 

When I came to and started the check-sum of my life I realized that we were offline. Getting us back online was fairly simple but took my direction to get it done and once completed we were live again. Essentially at this point I haven't made our migration to new equipment but now that I'm down and recovering from the episodes of late I have the time so it is planned. As for me I'm still living and after almost two months in the hospital they've finally released me back to home so I can recover fully. Long term prognosis and results are still out but optimistic. I have defied all the statistics and if I have anything to say about it will continue to do so. I'll answer any questions you guys have site or health related. I'm responsible, the buck stops on my desk, and I dropped the ball.

 

I hope that through all this you'll all understand and be compassionate when it comes to judging me, the professionalism and performance of CombatACE, and what happened to everyone across multiple sites and venues. It was never my plan nor my intention to leave anyone in the dark and I'm sure had anyone who knew what was happening to me would have let you all know had they've known to do so. Regardless I've made changes here locally where I keep an action plan and contact list should this type of thing happen again. At least that way someone will know and someone can communicate with you all should it happen again even if that's the very very very last thing I ever want.

 

My sincerest and humblest of apologies.

 

Erik

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

 

Erik, we were afraid it might have been something just like this that had caused the forums to go offline, but we had all hoped such was not the case. Very sorry to learn of your health issues, but I'm glad you are on the road to recovery Sir. I for one never left these forums and still consider it my OFF home. The other forum may now be our HQ, but this place is still the old camp we hang out at. I hope your health will continue to improve Eric, and I will keep you and yours in my thoughts and prayers.

 

Take care.

 

Lou

 

 

.

[Hasse Wind 46]

Good to hear you're recovering. Sounds like you had it very bad for a while.

 

Like Lou said, the OFF community is still here, and we have no intention of leaving.

[Andy73 3]

Hasse Wind, you are right.

 

 

 

I like this Place very much and I'm not going to leave

 

 

And I will also use the SimHQ - Forum

[Hellshade 110]

I think in the long run it will be a good thing that (W)OFF has two Forums.

 

One at SimHQ for all the new blood that will show up and ask a trillion questions about WOFF when it finally launches, as it will surely cause quite a stir once the list of features and incredible attention to detail gets out. The second forum, here, will be the perfect place for the "old hands" of (W)OFF to come and chat in relative peace and quiet with few, if any, worries about some of the egos and attitudes that invariable show up on the forums of successful games and sims.

 

I tell you fine gentlemen it was a blessing from the Almighty that this all occurred. We will be grateful for the separation when the time comes.

 

Hellshade

 

 

 

 

[RamblingSid 3]

Everyone -

 

I'm horrified after reading this. I owe you all an explanation and hopefully a reason to stay not to go.

 

I want everyone to know my official position is to have the entire membership of OFF to remain here, regardless of any changes or "official" forum. To me this is the home for OFF and always will be. I'm horrified that my personal life invaded the OFF community, it's members and collectively community decisions. That said here is the back story.

 

From the site stand point one of the many things I'm responsible for is hardware. Sometime back in January I started planning to upgrade our storage capacity namely hard drive storage. Just like your machines at home one of the definitive hard limits is how much we can physically store and with a site like this where files and content are added almost every second of the day our storage needs continue to grow. I monitor our equipment daily and plan for these variables it's part of what I do and the decisions are mine. The way our equipment works adding physical hard drive space isn't a matter of slapping in a new drive and moving on. We have the responsibility of redundancy, accessibility for speed, and long term storage. Hence any changes to our RAID configuration takes planning and poise.

 

The above in mind I planned the upgrade for May based on my work load and schedule. I started all the backups and moving of crucial data to my home work stations and had our data center fire up a new machine for our migration. The tentative schedule was to have everything moved by the 10th of May and the new machine was scheduled with the data center to go live then. I asked for the DNS migration to go into effect based on my schedule of how long it should take and where I was in the process and moved on. This isn't the first time I've done this and most of the time migrations and changes go off with little to no problems and are often something you guys ever notice.

 

On May 6th sometime near the 11:00 PM hour local time I arrived at the University Medical Center Emergency Room. Twenty minutes later I was in cardiac arrest from a pulmonary embolism that blocked the circulation to and exchange of oxygen with my lungs. I was officially in cardiac arrest for 45 minutes and coded 4 times while the great folks in the emergency department worked on me. During this episode of events I was iced and incubated into a medically induced coma followed by life support on ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation). I remained on ECMO for two weeks and drug induced in a coma while my body healed. ECMO is usually reserved for younger people and was a last ditch effort in saving my life. So there I was and I have no memory of any of it.

 

Waking up happened somewhere in May. My family was told that I had a 20% chance of surviving what happened to me and a less than 5% chance that I'd be a functioning adult afterwards. The fear was that due to the extreme distress I underwent that I'd have a mental or physical handicap as a result of the prolonged arrest, lack of oxygen, subsequent incubation, or transfer to ECMO. Regardless of any of this my life and what was happening at CombatACE continued forward. I didn't and couldn't communicate with the data center to let them know to stop what I had already started. My family who was in preservation mode didn't know to call someone about it and nobody had access to my email account which for most people are private anyway. Even if they had known what was going on with CombatACE there is nothing they could have done. We didn't go offline over something simple. Someone would have had to have known that I requested our DNS migration already and they simply wouldn't have known that. When the DNS request finally went into effect it pointed our domain to equipment that was essentially new and empty. We were officially offline at that point.

 

When I came to and started the check-sum of my life I realized that we were offline. Getting us back online was fairly simple but took my direction to get it done and once completed we were live again. Essentially at this point I haven't made our migration to new equipment but now that I'm down and recovering from the episodes of late I have the time so it is planned. As for me I'm still living and after almost two months in the hospital they've finally released me back to home so I can recover fully. Long term prognosis and results are still out but optimistic. I have defied all the statistics and if I have anything to say about it will continue to do so. I'll answer any questions you guys have site or health related. I'm responsible, the buck stops on my desk, and I dropped the ball.

 

I hope that through all this you'll all understand and be compassionate when it comes to judging me, the professionalism and performance of CombatACE, and what happened to everyone across multiple sites and venues. It was never my plan nor my intention to leave anyone in the dark and I'm sure had anyone who knew what was happening to me would have let you all know had they've known to do so. Regardless I've made changes here locally where I keep an action plan and contact list should this type of thing happen again. At least that way someone will know and someone can communicate with you all should it happen again even if that's the very very very last thing I ever want.

 

My sincerest and humblest of apologies.

 

Erik

 

 

Holy sh$t, Erik,

 

puts my very minor irritations in their proper place.

 

Thanks very much for the explanation.

 

Apology not required, just get well asap.

 

RS

[Von Paulus 8]

Don't worry, we are flying to th e two aerodromes.

We'll never leave CA. It feels like home.

The quickest recovery, Erik.

[CaptSopwith 26]

Holy sh$t, Erik,

 

puts my very minor irritations in their proper place.

 

Thanks very much for the explanation.

 

Apology not required, just get well asap.

 

RS

 

I very much echo Sid's sentiments. A website going down for a few days - or however long it was - is pretty small potatoes compared to what you've had to deal with. While I'm glad you've taken the steps to put an action plan in place for something that - I pray - you'll never need to put into motion - I really don't think an apology is necessary. I only hope the OBD guys like Pol and Winder read this at some point soon...

 

From my standpoint, I'm just thankful you're alive. At 30, I've had two rather nasty and close calls in my times - both behind the wheel - and the only thing that matters is your health. Your sentiment is more than appreciated but, please, above all else, get well and take care of yourself.

 

You've got my best wishes, my thoughts, and my prayers. Get well soon.

[angles1100 0]

Like others have said no apology necessary just work on getting yourself well again mate .

 

 

 

cheers

[Hellshade 110]

Erik,

I'd rather you be up and "running" than the Forum. I certainly wish you only the best and I thank you for all that you have done for OFFs forum and your dedication but please remember that nothing is more important than your health and your family. Additional drive space for the Forum sounds great, but not as great as getting oxygen to your lungs and brain. As pleased as we are are that you have been able to overcome such odds, I think we'd be even more pleased if you made sure you never had to try and overcome them a second time. Health and family sir. Everything else is replaceable.

 

Get well soon sir and God Bless.

 

Hellshade

[Dej 17]

I don't think anyone could agree that you 'dropped the ball', Erik. Rather it was batted violently from your safe and capable hands by the powers that be.

 

I hope you you continue to defy the odds to recover with unparallelled rapidity.

[+Erik 1,812]

Thank you all for the warm and well wishes. I beyond anyone am happy that my outcome has been so positive. There is so much more to the story that one day I only hope I'm able to share with everyone. Being in the hospital for so long is a sure fire way to have great experiences or at least funny ones. I have to say that without a doubt I know why Gabriel Giffords did so well after her event. Like her I was treated in the same facility however not necessarily by the same staff or doctors. I can't say enough for the facility and it's ever so capable care. Without them I wouldn't be here today and without their diligence I wouldn't be able to make the claims of besting any odds I have been able to make. I owe them entirely for everything.

 

Here's looking toward our future and the many sunsets yet to come. We're here to have fun and enjoy the company of others and I will continue to make sure that is exactly what we're able to do. If you haven't yet seen the post in the general forum > pub titled "What now?" you should give it a read.

 

As always all my best to everyone it's been an absolute pleasure having you all around.

 

Erik

[Olham 164]

Erik, we were afraid it might have been something just like this that had caused the forums to go offline, but we had all hoped such was not the case.

Very sorry to learn of your health issues, but I'm glad you are on the road to recovery Sir. I for one never left these forums and still consider it my OFF home.

The other forum may now be our HQ, but this place is still the old camp we hang out at.

I hope your health will continue to improve Eric, and I will keep you and yours in my thoughts and prayers.

 

Take care.

 

Lou

I can only agree to every word of what Lou said, Erik - all the best; and don't worry - just read the last passage of my post No. 1 again.

I would never desert this great place.

SimHQ may be the HQ - but this is my home drome.

No problem to visit both.

Edited July 10, 2012 by Olham

[DukeIronHand 8]

After 24 hours of thinking about it I am going to have "side" with Olham on this one.

 

I like SimHQ and go there often to check on other sims but somehow I will always associate this CA forum with OFF/WOFF.

 

This place is kind of like a broke-in pair of boots - its fits just fine.

 

This may be a sign of old age I reckon!

[OlPaint01 0]

I personally do not see why we must declare to the world a prime loyalty to either CombatACE or SimHQ forums. I am pleased that we have two great forums to share our thoughts and, yes, our arguments, with our dear friends in the OFF Community.

 

Each Forum has it's pluses and minuses. On one hand, it is definitely easier to upload Mods to CA Download Section. But on the other hand, it is easier to contact several individuals over SimHQ's PM system. But considering all this, I will steadfastly refuse to announce a favorite. I love and enjoy them both.

 

I know that Winder and OBD has made a business decision to post OFF and WOFF announcements on SimHQ. But generally the same news items are immediately copied to CA anyway. I keep each Website link within a keyboard's click anyhow.

 

We could argue both sides of this till we are 'Blue in the Face'...I will spend my time looking across the aerodrome into the clouds anxiously awaiting the courier flight from St.Omer with a special package...WOFF!!!

 

OlPaint

Edited July 11, 2012 by OlPaint01

[+Erik 1,812]

I really hope that is not what anyone is reading into this discussion or taking from it.

 

From my perspective I can try to explain why any of this is important to me and more importantly the community and our business decisions. I offered an explanation to the OFF Community and an apology because my personal life in May lapped over to the business affairs of OFF and affected the community here. My apology also included an explanation of what happened so you all knew why, what, and how those decisions came to be and that like all of you I don't take them lightly. In fact us being down for any period of time or having any part of our community moving or changing their traffic patterns is critically important to me. I wanted to make sure you all knew just how important which is why I responded to the thread here in hopes of doing just that while providing all of you some direct contact and discussion.

 

That said I think we've done a great job at covering the original topic started here. We've also been able to get the information delivered to the community which I needed to do and greatly appreciate. If some of my inner "protective instincts" for the CA community and the OFF community came through during any of that I apologize but I also hope it is understandable. I'm sure that everyone understands that my decisions and responsibilities, like OBD and Winder, focus on the business aspects and side of things here. The community, the software, the hardware, the upkeep, etc here all have real costs associated to them. If my actions or any action that happens here causes an impact to our revenue or ability to generate that revenue that's a problem as it directly impacts what and how we are able to provide to the entire community which OFF is part of. Simply put you're all an important part and factor of what keeps us open for business and providing what we do. I do not take that lightly nor do I want to be part of casually dismissing it away. The entire community here is far too important to me not to understand and appreciate what we all do for each other here.

 

For the record I'm deeply grateful for Doug and SIMHQ they are a terrific asset to this community and you'll never see me in a debate or discussion that puts us on opposite ends. I hope that helps aid in an understanding and takes us completely away from a site versus site call to arms or "show of loyalty" that I believe was referred to.

 

All my best;

 

Erik

[DukeIronHand 8]

Goodness people! This kind of like "your favorite plane" discussion or "who is hotter"!

 

I don't think anyone is taking this too seriously...