Who the hell shut off arizonashooting.com

[mike400]

Hopefully this one works out well.

[AstonMiura]

Must say I missed the other site a lot. I may not have contributed a lot, but I learned a ton. The search function was my best friend.

[Manitu]

The lack of moderation was quite noticeable in a negative way. I would see 4 page discussions in the classifieds for example. Off topic was like the no smoking section on an airplane that stench drifted over the entire site/cabin. After 10 years there I would venture the last 3 were just an occasional glance around . Some new sites around hopefully will keep it on topic.

[Mr_Maim]

From what little I gathered by snooping around online, the issue was with the former hosting site, which suddenly stopped providing service for AZS. They did the same to a few other Pro2A sites per snippets on the radio, so it makes sense.
Glad to have the site back either way.

No, they had DB corruption. As to why they don't have backups they could just revert to, who knows?

Frankly, when I transferred ownership of the site to [Brad], I thought he had the best intentions to continue running the site and make improvements which I didn't have the time to do (hence divesting myself of the site). No updates were done on it, per what I saw, and everything from the DB, to the forum software, etc, was severely out of date and without updates, it was only a matter of time before the site would be hacked or suffer a catastrophic failure. He monetized the site with Google ads (which I had not done) and when Google made policy changes for advertising on related sites many years ago, I'd imagine that he largely lost interest in dedicating time and effort to running, improving and maintaining the site since he lost what little financial incentive he had. This is all speculation based on anecdotal evidence, though - other than the site being down because of database corruption that isn't recoverable.

I met Brad several years ago, he was selling something firearm related and I went to his house to pick it up and we got to talking. I definitely got the impression that he had absolutely no idea whatsoever about how to run a Forum, maintain the database, update the software, and work with the ISP or Hosting company to make sure that backups were run and database snapshots were being taken; let alone load balancing to another server/blade. I think he thought "it is built, they will come" and he'd have the AZ equivalent of Calguns. I've done things far lager than running a little forum in my lifetime in IT and I offered my assistance FOR FREE, which he did not take. That forum was a ticking timebomb, I was not surprised in the least when I got DNS errors for a few days in a row.

Really hated that site. So I just made it a point to complain about the system clock once a year.

[FenixMike]

I stopped reading/posting because 99% of threads turned into anti cop/anti law enforcement, regardless of how they started. Gets old hearing the same old song and dance from the same people. Maybe this place will be better, we will see.

[Bigmalcolm]

I was wondering what really happened to that site. Rumors will be rumors.

[Pro2a]

I stopped reading/posting because 99% of threads turned into anti cop/anti law enforcement, regardless of how they started. Gets old hearing the same old song and dance from the same people. Maybe this place will be better, we will see.

Well anti cop is just an opinion, which is prevalent amongst the gun community. While I don't support the extreme side of it, I understand that their attitude is necessary to help combat the extreme left who think that ridiculous gun laws against "evil accessories" and other stupid restrictions do nothing.

[Robidouxs]

I’m still surprised that the operator of the site did not maintain a secondary backup off site as a contingency to prevent a total loss from occurring.

[John Kuhns]

At this point, what difference does it make?

[sonofbp]

If it was a money issue he should start a donation page or a gofundme
I'm sure everyone would help out

I wonder if you could rig a paid membership with a 24hr jump on all new classifieds before they are visible to the non-payers.
It would probably have outfunded the google ads at like $5 a month and would helped to keep the site alive.

[Winston_Wolf]

Really happy this site is up and running.

... me too

[Azbuilder]

Running a decent forum isn't as easy as some people think. Way back in the day before the explosion of the Internet there was a thing called a BBS and then various "Nets" including FidoNet, Freedoms Net, Adult Net and I can't remember how many. I was a member of several of them and carried them all on my BBS. It was a PITA, especially a multinode system like I was running. Software updates, nightly maintenance, on-line games that updates always seemed to make inoperable, etc. The add in the small segment of users asking what did they have to do to get access to the adult section, blah blah blah. I ran a great board, had several hundred users, was a mail hub for several other nodes, etc. But it just took time and then as the Internet started to get popular the visitors dropped rapidly. It wasn't too long about the year 2000 when I finally shut down for good.

Very true John, much harder then just throwing a site up. Glad to see a new site is up and it will be for all of us to participate and make it good like the old days!

[Three56]

So be it, the old site was corrupt with backpage losers anyway.

I had good luck with buyers and sellers.

[samnev]

So be it, the old site was corrupt with backpage losers anyway.

I had good luck with buyers and sellers.

So did I. The rest of the site, meh.

[zonie77]

At this point I'm glad it's up and running even slightly changed.