thetvdb.com has been unavailable for several hours

I am in Michigan. For most of the day I was able to access thetvdb.com without any problems or delays. 2 or 3 hours ago it started timing out for direct access. pings and traceroutes both fail. I have also had some problems with imdb. The traceroutes for thetvdb failed at seattle, while those for imdb faled near Washington, DC (I think). thetvdb needs some ghosts, may imdb too.

Any other reports or insights?

Yep TVDB is not working for me either tonight, but IMDB is up!

Yesterday thetvdb was available most of the day until around 5:00PM EDT (Eastern US). That is also about the time it became unavailable the other day. It continued to be unavailable every time I checked through the evening and was also unavailable a couple of minutes ago. (9:30AM EDT). All of these checks were with firefox 3.5x on WinXP SP2. I always check with firefox before I try to update a TV show because many episodes are missing for many of the shows I am organizing.

If MC and XBMC are going to tie their fortunes so firmly to thetvdb then it needs to be a whole lot more powerful and reliable than it has been lately. Does anyone know a good place to find out what the problem is even when their main site is unavailable? Is there any talk of setting up mirrors?

Apparently progress on this front is on the way....

http://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2614

Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

Apparently progress on this front is on the way....

http://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2614

Cheers

What I get out of that exchange is that the tvdb guys are not open to suggestion or to any kind of rational way of handling things. In the past I have asked about uploading complete series of 50 or so episodes as a batch, but they had all sorts of excuses about that. If they are not willing to open up, thetvdb will not be capable of scaling to meet the load that is being increasingly placed on it as more and more people hit thetvdb for information about tv shows. I saw something similar in 1992 when it was still an open question whether gopher or www would be direction of future growth of sites on the Internet. I went to a conference at gopher headquarters at UofMinn, and the pushback of the developers against the user community was so strong that I and everyone else at gophercon immediately shifted our sites from gopher to http/html and you can see what happened. How long has it been since anyone saw a gopher site? We desperately need an opensource alternative to thetvdb or we will all be cut off at the knees.

Well yes I agree, but discussion is the first step to getting the issues addressed. I do admit that there has been a lot of talk re mirror sites, but none as yet have appeared....

RE TVDB, on one side we are very happy to have such a resource & if anything a little spoilt that it exists at all - we notice it missing the most when it is not there, like a good friend or family member....

With the internet being the internet if you drop the ball, several other players will rise to the top.....