Portfolio52 Website Unavailable / Down

[Strag]

If it has actually been closed down then I’m pretty angry about it. I can tolerate waiting for cards, ie. Blind Tiger, but closing down such a valuable and used resource without at least mentioning it or offering someone to take it over is pretty s**t, in my opinion.

Not to mention that the money that was raised from NPCCD was supposed to go to maintaining and improving P52. So not only has Alex not delivered on those decks, he's also misused those funds.

Yeah yeah, have patience, blah blah. Again I fail to see how it's impossible these days for SO MANY playing card people to simply send a freakin' email!

[GandalfPC]

Again I fail to see how it's impossible these days for SO MANY playing card people to simply send a freakin' email!

The thing is, we have seen it many times - and I have yet to see a story behind it that isn’t tragic. I become more concerned for Alex the longer he is out of contact for that reason.

[Timmargh]

Again I fail to see how it's impossible these days for SO MANY playing card people to simply send a freakin' email!

The thing is, we have seen it many times - and I have yet to see a story behind it that isn’t tragic. I become more concerned for Alex the longer he is out of contact for that reason.

I agree. Peed off as I am, I am worried about the guy.

[joeblow]

I just hope he's ok really. Unfortunately this feels like something more serious. Alex is not able to be involved at all at the moment and not paying bills, managing projects. Perhaps someone related finished off Limbo because there was little left to do. But other projects are probably too complex to be helped along.

[ShuffleUpandDeal]

If it has actually been closed down then I’m pretty angry about it. I can tolerate waiting for cards, ie. Blind Tiger, but closing down such a valuable and used resource without at least mentioning it or offering someone to take it over is pretty s**t, in my opinion.

Not to mention that the money that was raised from NPCCD was supposed to go to maintaining and improving P52. So not only has Alex not delivered on those decks, he's also misused those funds.

Yeah yeah, have patience, blah blah. Again I fail to see how it's impossible these days for SO MANY playing card people to simply send a freakin' email!

He has? That's terrible. Hate creators doing that.

[ShuffleUpandDeal]

Again I fail to see how it's impossible these days for SO MANY playing card people to simply send a freakin' email!

The thing is, we have seen it many times - and I have yet to see a story behind it that isn’t tragic. I become more concerned for Alex the longer he is out of contact for that reason.

What is this tragic story? What is going on with him?

[GandalfPC]

Very little information would be a great deal more than we have at the moment.

[max]

At this point, with Portfolio52 unlikely to become active again (at least for a considerable time), it's evident that we need to take action, especially those of us who not only relied heavily on the stored information but also had a direct involvement in building the site's content.

Regardless of any personal or other issues that may have led to PF52's downfall, issues we are not privy to and therefore cannot help resolve, I would at least like the reassurance that I can use any information I may have managed to recover through past copy-and-paste efforts to migrate to any other platform.

The last thing I want is to be left completely unprotected, with no support or communication, having lost countless hours of my time invested in enhancing a platform that has now vanished, only to later be accused of any sort of "fraudulent" information use. I believe there are many users who have partial copies of the collections stored in PF52. I've been asking Alex for years to restore the ability to download data, something he always said he would do but never did, forcing me to use manual procedures to retrieve some information. Now, I want to feel completely free to use any of the information stored in PF52 to feed into any other tool that partially restores my ability to continue working on cataloging my collection.

I am deeply disappointed in how this matter has been handled, especially by the complete lack of communication. I would greatly regret it if the root cause were some sort of personal tragedy, but I also understand that there should be several people in charge of a project of this magnitude with the capacity to react and communicate in such a critical moment.

If I can be of any assistance, I am here.

[bdawg923]

Just my $0.02 but Max is right. Echoing this. For a project of p52's magnitude and importance to the community, any new project / website should be run by multiple trusted people in case one of them drops out for whatever reason. Some sort of committee that has admin level access to every part of it. There should be multiple backups such as a website backup however that's done with the hosting provider, as well as media backup of deck pics using something like Google drive, Dropbox, Flickr, amazon photos, whatever that anyone can access publicly should something happen to the site. There should be multiple admins with login credentials to the host, to the domain provider, to the backups, etc. If something does happen to a potential p52 successor, it should be painless to switch over to a new site, as a last resort.

[hsbc]

If I can be of any assistance, I am here.

In case you haven't seen it check out this thread: https://www.unitedcardists.com/viewtopic.php?t=23202

[max]

If I can be of any assistance, I am here.

In case you haven't seen it check out this thread: https://www.unitedcardists.com/viewtopic.php?t=23202

Yes, thank you very much. I've been in touch with Manu from the beginning and I've provided him with all the information I could gather from Portfolio52 before its demise. I just wanted to make it clear in my previous message that, from my perspective, any user who has been able to collect information as I did is completely justified in using it, especially considering that we've been left completely unassisted in this matter from PF52 responsible parties.

[GandalfPC]

It does seem that there are no legal issue in using the data - it was always “everyone’s”.

[ShuffleUpandDeal]

Yeah i'n not sure what the problem would be, all that info was public ally available and added by users. What exactly would P52 claim to own? I say use what you have.

[GandalfPC]

I think there is more of a technicality not in P52 making a claim but that each user that posted the data only granted P52 rights and did not specifically grant public rights, thus they could object to the data being used elsewhere - not something I see happening, but a posted policy to allow for it and a procedure should handle that

in this case as it is not commercial but archival and educational etc there is an argument that it is fair use to publish it in a non commercial form to prevent its loss. a host of reasons that it should be ok, but its not “legal regardless of execution”

[kevork]

The image names scraped from P52 are numbered to the corresponding deck entry. If anyone has images and are worried about copyright issues, just send them to me privately and I'll upload them to Google drive for everyone as I've already done with the ones I have. If they're duplicates with ones I already have, it'll be easy to tell.

[Timmargh]

Hopefully, P52's resurfacing means that Alex is maybe okay.

[bdawg923]

In a post about p52 being dead forever

[kevork]

In a post about p52 being dead forever
IMG_3670.jpeg

Wow. So it's still unclear if Alex is okay or not.

[hsbc]

Link to post

[Honeybee]

Not holding my breath that it will last but gosh it is good to have it back!
I think I will spend all weekend browsing it

[montenzi]

Link to post

Hopefully, he has at least a database backup (just in case).

[ShuffleUpandDeal]

Just added a bunch of decks

[Honeybee]

I did notice some decks on there Shuffle that I was sure were only released after P52 went down
Not adding any myself until I am sure they will survive

I am guessing this annoying feature (or lack of) was always there but I had just forgotten it
You do a search for a deck and you get the resulting decks - which if you hover on a deck you see a second pic for (back or whatever)
You click on a deck and you see the 'short' summary and still can see a second image if you hover
You go to the Full Page Info and you no longer get a second image when you hover - seems like a glitch as Full Page Info should have the most info (I know we sometimes have a gallery to look at - but not often)

[hsbc]

[ShuffleUpandDeal]

Website seems broken again, was fine a day or two ago, now search results are coming back up empty and same when you click on recently added

[Honeybee]

The post before yours says that it was due for a reboot on May 10 - significant?

[kevork]

It's been stated it's a cache issue in the comment reply to this post and will be rebooted tonight.

[Honeybee]

Pleeeeeeeeeeezz Rob

[ShuffleUpandDeal]

Seems things were not rebooted yet

[montenzi]

It's been stated it's a cache issue in the comment reply to this post and will be rebooted tonight.

Ask him to create a 1:1 backup! It's much better to be prepared.