Trainzkuidindex.com to be closed soon

Because of the time-consuming work to keep up-to-date the data base and the weak support of the community to help, and also because I have no more money and I need to spend my time to find money now, I decide to close the site in a few days.

I am very sad of that situation and I apologize to the thousands of users who make every month more than 20.000 requests for finding missing kuid.

Many thanks to the 69 people who support my work by donating. I apologize to them too.

Pierre

Sorry to hear, your site really helped me locate a few missing KUIDs, best site there

I will miss your site

ahhhh bummer one of the best trainz sites out there. If possible can someone take over the site from you if they wanted too?

pierreparis said:

Because of the time-consuming work to keep up-to-date the data base and the weak support of the community to help, and also because I have no more money and I need to spend my time to find money now, I decide to close the site in a few days.

I am very sad of that situation and I apologize to the thousands of users who make every month more than 20.000 requests for finding missing kuid.

Many thanks to the 69 people who support my work by donating. I apologize to them too.

Pierre

Click to expand...

:'( Indeed this is a very sad day, maybe you could start a Kickstarter request and possibly folks will support?

https://www.kickstarter.com/

I am one of your supporters and I do understand, this is something that has to be funded.


Wish you the best luck, and thank you for the great site. It will be sorely missed.

Sad to hear! I would help but my money pile is very small at the moment

Pierre

Assuming that you do no more searching for KUIDs, what are your fixed costs for running your website? In effect you freeze it at its current state and devote yourself to finding the money you need. If people could pledge to support that, would it help?

You could also change the site so that people have to register (and pay a fee) to search the site.

edit :- You say "in a few days", is this because you have to renew the site or close it. What do you need right now?

Peter

Narrowguage, That is good question's.

Presumably it will be archived on the Wayback Machine? I can still find snapshots of my long closed websites on there.

Is there any chance of asking N3V whether they could host what is quite a vital service to many Trainz users?

Vern said:

Presumably it will be archived on the Wayback Machine? I can still find snapshots of my long closed websites on there.

Is there any chance of asking N3V whether they could host what is quite a vital service to many Trainz users?

Click to expand...

The root cause of missing kuids is that they are on 3rd-party websites instead of the N3V Download Station. I wouldn't expect N3V to, in effect, support 3rd-party websites in any way.

As one of the supporters of the website I'm saddened to hear about it's impending closure as it's a very useful resource.

Unfortunately as I'm reliant on disability related income there's only so much I will be able to do to help keep it going financially. I do help keep at least one other Trainzers site going via my own webservers though.

Shane

This is sad news indeed.

I manage a number of websites myself, and cough up funds for hosting and domain names regularly. In fact, I will be coughing up some $$$ tomorrow. Its getting more expensive, and then there is the cloud. That comes free, but the better and faster ones cost. So I understand what Pierre is saying.

If a website gets belted (i.e, too many visitors,) it goes offline until the hits fall below a defined rate. You want to keep it online you pay more. This is where the unexpected cost is. And the visitors don't see that. And then search engines, bots and crawlers are in there too.

There are many variables to keeping a site online. The site is worth saving although, and I just wonder what kind of user-pays model will cover the costs.

narrowgauge said:

Pierre

Assuming that you do no more searching for KUIDs, what are your fixed costs for running your website? In effect you freeze it at its current state and devote yourself to finding the money you need. If people could pledge to support that, would it help?

You could also change the site so that people have to register (and pay a fee) to search the site.

edit :- You say "in a few days", is this because you have to renew the site or close it. What do you need right now?

Peter

Click to expand...

Peter

Yes, I must renew the hosting next month. And yes I could pay for 1 year more, it not so expansive (120 euros/Y). But if I stop to crawl Trainz fan sites and don't update trainzkuidindex, the data base will become obsolete very quickly, and the site quite useless after 1 year. Many links change very quickly on Internet for various raisons : when I begin to crawl I was very suprised by that.
Pay a fee : how many people will accept to pay arround 15 US$ per year ? I worry, that, instead to pay, some guys share 1 username/password with many people on some forum. My feeling is that people don't have money for that.

Pierre

Vern said:

Presumably it will be archived on the Wayback Machine? I can still find snapshots of my long closed websites on there.

Is there any chance of asking N3V whether they could host what is quite a vital service to many Trainz users?

Click to expand...

You will find trainzkuidindex on the Wayback Machine, but not the data base ... So no answer to your request for missing kuid ...

Another expense to running a website, if you have a customer login, you will soon need to provide a secure web addres, i.e. httpS//www. etc.
I have 3 sales sites running at the moment and I am only selling stuff from my collections (hoards) but try to log in with some browsers and you get a "this connection is not secure" message. These security certificates will cost about 50.00 GBP each year for each web address!
I don't have any personal payment details on my sites, customer pays by clicking a Pay by PayPal button.

Here is what I get on Trainz Portal in Firefox browser...

Very sorry to see this go. It makes me feel bad for not contributing to the site.

When the site was brought up a back in February it had 52 contributors.

Those of us who contributed shamed 13 more people to contribute.

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?136646-trainzkuidindex-problems

798 visits of 7 postings.

Unbelievable!!

Harold

Pierre

120 Euros is about 170 Australian dollars. I'll put my hand up for half, that's $A85, about 60 euros, and if you remind me and I'm still alive, Ill do it again next year. Will that get you out of trouble? Now is your chance to get this sorted out.

There's a challenge, who's going to match me for 60 euros.

Gotta help a namesake in need.

Peter(Pierre)

I really like the Kickstarter idea proposed by BlueOdessey.

Set a funding goal to cover the time it would take you
to support the website.
If not enough people commit their pledges, then they do not value the service enough to see it continue.
If enough people see that they will lose this valuable resource, then you may get sufficient contributions to continue the service.

If the pitch is not successful, I am sure once the website no longer exists, there will be alot of people who wished they had contributed.

I am also sure that N3V Games will be a willing pledger to any Kickstarter project. Pierre, you have my email address, so please message me if you would like to discuss further.

p.s. If anyone is wondering why N3V would want to support a third party site, the answer is simple. For various reasons a number of content creators prefer to host their content on their own site rather than the DLS. This means that while their site is live, people can get it for free and share it for free and include it as a dependency in content that is hosted by us. But ultimately it's their call and 1 in 3 items are hosted this way. (Unfortunately a huge number of these sites also fade off into the sunset).

A site like TKI makes it much easier for customers to find this content (but far from easy) and it takes continuous effort to keep things up to date with all the sites that shutdown. It's better than having no solution, hence our support

I was also a contributing member, and is a sad day indeed! I can't tell you how many times I've used your invaluable site... how many happy moments when at last I'd finally found that missin' Kuid (X 1000)!!! I am sure there were 10's of thousand's of Trainzers who have been using your site; but have took your service for our Trainz Community for granted! They could NOT afford a measly $10.00... it's appalling!!! So sorry to see you go; but do understand the contributions just don't cut it! Thank you for for all those Kuids I would not have found so easily on my own, and the priceless service you had provided us all!

As Tony said, I do certainly hope you take BlueOdessey up on the Kickstarter proposal idea! If not we all wish you well on your next venture Pierreparis!

We will gladly supply you with as much space and hosting as you need at no charge, we would be interested in helping. Let us know what we can do.

Thanks

Mike