Hanging on Silence that has become Deafening

The roleplay site is still down. There was no new news today. The chat channel has become Grand Central Station to rpol withdrawal. Word is getting around, slowly but surely. We have no idea what's going on, though we're hanging all our hopes on the site being back up tomorrow, in some shape or another.

It's rather disturbing that there was no new update today on the webhost support pages, by the only competent guy on the inside. It makes me think something else has gone horribly wrong. I'd hate to be that guy right now, because he's having to dig out of a massive hole that he had no part in creating, and for his troubles he's probably going to get sacked when it's all over. He's standing up for the customers too much not to be noticed.

Meanwhile I have no idea what I would do if we lose our games. There were thousands of them, thousands of participants, with millions of posts. The last time I heard any usage stats, the main menu was being accessed at the rate of 3 times per second. My oldest active game on there (in which I was a player) was over three years old. There are games on there which are older than that. And I never backed anything up, because up until now rpol has been solidly reliable with an admin who has always taken very good care of us.

Worst case scenario is that the webhosts lose it all permanently. There are some concerns that jase's nightly backups might not have run properly, and we don't know at the moment how old the most recent working backup is (he hasn't told us). They are looking at new webhosts, and if worst comes to worst they will take a few days to set it up again from scratch.

So we're all sitting around with everything crossed that can possibly be crossed and hoping for the best, while trying not to think too much about the worst. At this point I've reached my own limit of tolerance for rpol's absence. I keep wanting to load up the main menu to see what everybody is doing, or linking to things in there for other people to see. It's a lot like a missing tooth, where your tongue keeps going over to feel out the gap. Most people had reached that point by the first day, but I had novels to distract me for a little while ... it's caught up to me now, though. :(