19 hours ago: I think the formatting problem might be cleared up once the new image server is fully operational.

1 day ago: fixed, sorry about that.

6 days ago: Another piece of trivia - we had considered naming Rainier "Jeff" instead (after the comic book guy's first name) but decided against it since Dave's roommate has the same name (and that would have been confusing). Our rationale for choosing "Jeff" was that the machine served images (mainly) and Comic Book Guy sells comics (images on paper). We decided on Rainier Wolfcastle in the end because the machine was (and still is) physically the largest server we have.

9 days ago: We're doing all we can to resolve the problem, but, right now, there's nothing we can do to speed up the process. We're waiting on the data recovery - the sheer amount of data takes a while to be recovered from the drives - and have express ordered a new server to be build and shipped to our data center for replacement. That's why we provided the Friday date for our best guess when we'll have full images operation again. Unfortunately, the last couple days weren't business days so we were limited to only the things that the four of us could do without other companies. Hang in there...

10 days ago: BellaSwanCullen, I've messaged you to get a more detailed bug report.

10 days ago: So, the temp server we've got running is serving some of the older images on it (that's why we can show some of the image gallery images and some of the user images). If you happen to get lucky and some of your user images show up (for example, on papa's account 8 out of 13 work), then you can switch your profile picture to one of the working ones until with get a fully functioning image machine up. Unfortunately, if none of your images happened to be on our temporary server, then we'll have to ask you to be patient with us.

10 days ago: Sorry, I just realized that I needed to clarify about image uploads to picks, quizzes, and soapbox.

Short version: It take several hours to several days before you can upload images due to how the internet works.

Longer version: We handle image uploads asynchronously one different servers than the one that serves the majority of our web pages. There is a limitation in HTML that requires all servers working together in this method of uploading to be on the same domain (fanpop.com). Because of the way domain name servers (DNS's) work it may take a few hours to several days for an update that we make on our servers to reach your internet service provider (ISP) (and subsequently to be passed onto your computer).

I took the liberty of dropping in a little test file for you guys to see if your ISP has updated and the image uploading for picks, quizzes, and soapbox are working. Just go to this test page and (if I didn't make a mistake) it should tell you if you can see the temporary server we installed. (This test page will be removed once all this image stuff has been all fixed.)

10 days ago: We brought up a temporary server to handle some of the image load. A lot of the images will still be failing to load, but you should be able to upload images to continue to make picks, quizzes and soapbox at this point.

Also some of the older images are now being served from a backup images server, but we're still working on the more recent images. Until we sort out the bigger issue, user image uploads and image gallery uploads have been put on pause.

I'm hoping we'll get the data recovered and a new image server up and running by the end of the week (Friday?) but these last 30 hours have been "interesting" and who knows what the next couple days will have in store for us. All I know is that we'll work through the technical difficulties and keep providing you guys the best Fanpop experience that we can manage and try to recover as fast as we can.

Thanks to everyone for being so understanding!

24 days ago: This bug was fixed shortly after papa's last comment.

24 days ago: Is there any pattern to the vanishing edit/delete buttons? Any clue as to when it is there and when it is not?