How did you react to the great TestMagic outage of 2010?

[Gecko]

Rep points for Erin

[hotfuss]

During the outage I discovered several interesting things.

1. I was a bit more relaxed.

2. Despite being more relaxed, I still felt the urge to use a forum like TestMagic.

3. I found that there were features about Grad Cafe's forum that were better than TestMagic.
(i) It has a special site that is easier to read and use on an iPhone.
(ii) There was something about it that made users know what the threads would be about. I think it was the fact that you knew users would not be asking questions about "should I do a PhD?", "What is the best school for micro theory?" etc, but would be discussing issues very closely related to the acceptance/rejection process, such as, "When is the flyout?", "Are Harvard admits real?", "Is Northwestern finished with offers?" and "Should I choose Northwestern or Princeton?". Since TM gets so many posts, it would make it much easier seperate the Econ PhD threads into different topics. This raises the question of how to categorise the threads into different topics. I could propose some options, but the administrators would have access to usage data which perhaps could be used to assist this.

Of course, there are about a million things that makes TM better than Grad Cafe, that I have not mentioned.

[dsdoodle]

I learned how to use Gradcafe during the outage, and then realized that it could be very useful but never to be trusted!

[Cartman84]

I lost my account - had to re-create it with my different e-mail address. Hopefully, I posted like 8 messages so far. However, the outage was stressful, I thought there's something seriously wrong with my browser .

[untitled]

Hi all,

Wow, the results thread has filled up fast. I wanted to update the preliminary aggregation graphs and wondered how the change will effect everything. For one, did many people change their profile name? There are only a couple posts to the New Roll Call Fall 2010, but it isn't sticky, so I don't know what to make of it? Does anyone know if there are plans to reinstate the (un?)dead accounts? Is there anything I should think about before I start using the new info?

[walt526]

I'm posting under the same username. Some who lost their accounts seem to have re-registered under the same names.

[Erin]

Aw, man. Walt. You had over 1,000 posts, didn't you? Holy carp.

I'm actually talking to the people who have the hard drive; I'm going to ask them to mail it to me so that I can take it to a data recovery service. I'm not extremely hopeful, though. There are a many different hypotheses, but two techs said that the inaccessibility of the drive led them to believe that one of the heads had broken off of the arm and scratched the platter.

Man, I'm so sorry.

[wobuffet]

Hm... I didn't make a new account (same username), but my post count was lost.

[walt526]

Actually, it was almost 2000 (1970-something), and a couple hundred rep points. When it reset to May 31, 2009, I had all of one post. LOL.

No worries though, I'm just glad to have it back up!

[wobuffet]

Almost 200 posts??

While we're on the subject, do reputation points functionally do anything? I've searched the FAQs before, but to no avail.