Several times within the last several months, the site has been down and inaccessible for indefinite periods of time. This is not a complaint. I understand that I am given access to the site and its contents free of charge, and am very grateful for that. I'm just concerned as to why it keeps happening. Is the site in danger of disappearing for good? I really hope not. This is a wonderful place, and I really don't want to see it lost.

I think it's fair game to ask. There's hardly an official pronunciation on the matter when it does return; and if there is, it's quickly buried under the inrush of user activity on other threads.

Hello. A moderator here, I'd wager there's one main reason behind the lack of any official pronunciation on the issue:

1) The most active staff members (Jessie, Enkidoh, Orie and I) probably don't know much more than you… Your guess is as good as ours.

You're not getting an answer because we can't really give you one. I realize this may not be the reply you're looking for, folks, but it's the truth I can offer; I sure as hell don't know why the Shrine started going offline so often (nor if it will always come back online whenever the problem occurs).

My observation has been that the site goes down between the 8th and 12th of EVERY month and comes back online 2-4 business days later.

Test it for yourself in September...it should follow the same pattern. I figured it was down for some sort of scheduled maintenance as it has stuck to the same schedule all year so far ;)

My observation has been that the site goes down between the 8th and 12th of EVERY month and comes back online 2-4 business days later.

Test it for yourself in September...it should follow the same pattern. I figured it was down for some sort of scheduled maintenance as it has stuck to the same schedule all year so far ;)

Most forums have a 'We are closed for scheduled maintenance, we'll resume on X date at X time" message. Instead, we get a '404' if we try during these times.

My observation has been that the site goes down between the 8th and 12th of EVERY month and comes back online 2-4 business days later.

Test it for yourself in September...it should follow the same pattern. I figured it was down for some sort of scheduled maintenance as it has stuck to the same schedule all year so far ;)

That's interesting ... I will check it out next month. It always annoys me like hell.

Have to admit that the question has crossed my mind, especially since it went down again recently for a good number of days

Could it be some kind of attack? I've seen some comments about this forum in various places that while not leveling any threats against the forum or site, do show how some people don't like it. This site is amazing, just don't want to lose it is all

After at least one recent downtime the site returned with a virus/malware. There are other threads that have discussed this. The last time it was KPOT Stealer malware. Additionally, in the past, the site was hacked and "approximately 620k records were released containing email addresses, IP addresses and salted hashes of passwords" (according to haveibeenpwned.com), so I think the forum is vulnerable to attacks. Ideally, security would be increased (https, for example), but I gather it's difficult to contact the site owners. As Leon Scott Kennedy says in this thread, nobody knows if the site will return after the outages (and, if it does, what will be embedded). Always make sure your virus/anti-malware is up to date.
This is such an amazing forum. One of my favourites. It'd be a shame if hackers ruined it.

I'm not sure if https would make an impact on a deliberate attack, say a ddos? Doesn't that work by overwhelming the server? But definitely, it could do with added security, https would definitely be a good start and would help to prevent stolen data but also something like cloudflare (no idea how much that would cost or if there's ddos protection that's open source) since this site may be a target of such attacks. Though without speaking to the admins/webmaster that'll all be incredibly difficult if not impossible to roll out. I completely agree regarding antivirus stuff, I frequently run several antivirus scans on all my devices so hopefully...

My observation has been that the site goes down between the 8th and 12th of EVERY month and comes back online 2-4 business days later.

Test it for yourself in September...it should follow the same pattern. I figured it was down for some sort of scheduled maintenance as it has stuck to the same schedule all year so far ;)

You're not wrong, the site just went down again this month exactly during those days that you predicted !

My observation has been that the site goes down between the 8th and 12th of EVERY month and comes back online 2-4 business days later.

Test it for yourself in September...it should follow the same pattern. I figured it was down for some sort of scheduled maintenance as it has stuck to the same schedule all year so far ;)

September: forum down from 9th to 12th.

Congatulations!!!

My observation has been that the site goes down between the 8th and 12th of EVERY month and comes back online 2-4 business days later.

Test it for yourself in September...it should follow the same pattern. I figured it was down for some sort of scheduled maintenance as it has stuck to the same schedule all year so far ;)

The exact post I thought of this week.

This whole situation:

Still alive!

Glad we are up and running again!

Yesterday, the site's domain was actually expired and up for sale. Anyone could have simply registered the domain themselves if they so wanted. The site is evidently teetering on the verge of disappearing permanently.

I don't know anything about how the site is run or who runs it, but if there are financial issues, perhaps a donation box in the header would be a good idea, like Wikipedia for example does from time to time? I know a lot of mostly lurkers like myself use this site extensively for niche downloads that alternatives don't provide.

Yesterday, the site's domain was actually expired and up for sale. Anyone could have simply registered the domain themselves if they so wanted. The site is evidently teetering on the verge of disappearing permanently.

I don't know anything about how the site is run or who runs it, but if there are financial issues, perhaps a donation box in the header would be a good idea, like Wikipedia for example does from time to time? I know a lot of mostly lurkers like myself use this site extensively for niche downloads that alternatives don't provide.
I’d pay gladly, mate!

I’d pay gladly, mate!

Me too!

Site is inaccessible in Australia for the moment. VPNs help

This site has tried donations in the past and there were complications, with some people suspecting that the owner Sarah was not using the money the way she claimed to be (to put it mildly). That was a few years ago. Since then Sarah has been totally non-communicative about the state of the site, its finances, or why it goes down on a monthly basis; it might be a money problem or something else entirely. I guess neither the mods (or mod, since there's only one left who still is active) nor Jessie still have communication with Sarah either, so who knows what the deal is.

When the site goes down each month it's not maintenance. It's the site completely vanishing from the internet for a couple of days. Shrine selfhosts their DNS, and the servers serving DNS requests also go down. So nobody knows how to find the site anymore. Using the cached IPs also goes into nothing.

Going by the fact that the domain was literally up for sale - anybody could have bought it - I'm assuming a payment is always late, or something, and the provider shuts down the servers for a while. Scheduled maintance doesn't fit with the fact that somebody forgot to renew their domain. Which should happen automatically, anyway.

Edit: Some post above says we get a "404" during those times. That's entirely wrong. 404 is a message sent by a server saying the resource requested does not exist. The server needs to be a live and respond to the request to do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_Client_errors

This site has tried donations in the past and there were complications, with some people suspecting that the owner Sarah was not using the money the way she claimed to be (to put it mildly). That was a few years ago. Since then Sarah has been totally non-communicative about the state of the site, its finances, or why it goes down on a monthly basis; it might be a money problem or something else entirely. I guess neither the mods (or mod, since there's only one left who still is active) nor Jessie still have communication with Sarah either, so who knows what the deal is.

Even if the owner doesn't use the money specifically for the site, if donations help ensure she bothers to keep the site up, it's worth having a donation box open at least. If she's currently paying for the site out of her own pocket without being engaged with it, there's probably not much incentive for her to keep it alive.

The addition of a donation box/bar to be displayed on the index (at least) was suggested many times in the past, back when certain information didn't show up around here, that is.
As you can see, it was ignored every single time.