UPDATE (as of Saturday July 26th)
Hey, here's a quick update on the image servers. All of the images have been recovered and are being served using the new servers. Image serving might be a little slow today (Saturday, the 26th) and tomorrow as we improve things under the hood.

Turning image uploads back on is coming along and the work so far is going well. Right now, it's a little early to say when exactly the new server will be ready for uploads, but we'll update you all here as we progress.

Thanks again for your patience.

UPDATE (as of Thursday July 24th)
Hey folks, thanks for your patience. We've gotten the vast majority of images back up online.

While the images are showing, there's still work to be done to get the new machine ready for image uploads. We'll re-enable image uploads as soon as the servers are ready.

Thanks for your support through all this!



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You may have noticed *ahem* a little problem we're having with some of the images. We're working on the problem.

UPDATE (as of Monday July 21st) -- I'm just reposting another comment I made on page 3 and 4 of this thread so everyone can see it...

Just a recap for everyone:

What happened:
* One of our image machines suffered a major failure (basically really really bad luck -- like if you suffered 4 flat tires all at once bad luck).

The Good:
* Some images for picks, profiles as well as photos, wallpapers, icons etc are back up
* You can add images again to soapboxes, picks and quiz now (that functionality is working once more after being out late Friday/Saturday)
* We are *confident* that we will have most (if not ALL) of the images back up (it will just take time - we have some experts assisting us and will also be needing some new hardware which also takes time to get/configure/test)

The Bad:
* Image uploads (wallpapers, icons, fan art, screencaps) is disabled
* Profile page image uploads are also disabled
* Full recovery will require time, most likely until Wednesday this week (but maybe we'll get lucky and it will be sooner! rub your collective rabbit's feet for Fanpop!)

In the aftermath we'll also be instituting some changes that will hopefully allow us a speedier recovery in the future and even further minimize the chance of something bad happening.

Also - Michael and Cliff spent some serious weekend time working on this all night Friday and pretty much all day Saturday. So feel free to give them a prop for their efforts -- even though there's still a lot of work to do.

Will keep you all posted.

In the meantime, ASCII art is fully supported in the forums...so go crazy! ;-)