ALLAKHAZAM DOWN

[SiegeTank]

Allakhazam, at least its EQ section (the only part I visit) has been down for days. The latest placeholder page says they've had equipment malfunction.

Amazing how dependent you can get on that site. There is NOTHING on the web, including especially DBG's site, which has as much valuable and irreplaceable info about EQ. The lack of it actually makes it hard to play the game, IMO.

I hope they come back soon. Altho every day goes by makes me wonder. How long does it take to replace some servers?

 

[William12]

Fry should start an eq site so he can spam mmobugs ads on it

 

[dewey2461]

Would be nice if someone were able to duplicate the site content in event it goes away.

 

[NightGod]

This method sucks, but it's better than what we have in the meantime.
Google the information you're looking for. Be as specific as possible.
Right-click the link to Alla's that shows up for what you need, choose "Copy link address".
Go to archive.org/web and paste the link into the address bar at the top of the page and pic a snapshot out of their history.
The page that come up kinda looks like hot trash, but you can see all the important info.

 

[SiegeTank]

ZAM has treated the Everquest sections as a red-headed stepchild for years. Hell, if you go to ZAM's main page there isn't even an obvious link to the EQ section. Which makes me fear that if they don't bring it back online all that invaluable information will be lost forever. It's an incredible source. I mean just the posted comments, some of which go back almost to the beginning days of EQ, are of incredible value in documenting the history and development of the game.

Every time an EQ-related site gets removed, it's a big loss, because usually no effort has been made to archive the contents or to move them to another active site. But this loss would trump all those put together.

Of course, it probably WILL come back. I just can't imagine why it would take this long. Presumably they make ad revenue from it and that means they're losing money every day.

 

[dewey2461]

Of course, it probably WILL come back. I just can't imagine why it would take this long.

It depends on how good your backup plans are. Big organizations actually plan for and practice standing up machines and restoring from backup. Small shops often do "backups" but then find its not as straight forward to restore.

It would be interesting to hear from someone inside what's going on.

 

[dewey2461]

You may find eq resources helpful. I find the quest write up's to be quite good.

EQ Resource - The Resource for your EverQuest needs

 

[SiegeTank]

That's a fine site but not even close to what allak provides. Gotta be honest here! Take what we can get tho...

 

[aspire2008]

I'm not sure what you need ZAM for, you can find everything you need between, EQresource, Raidloot, EQitems, and EqTraders. Combine all 4 of those and it does everything ZAM does, unless you need to find info on older quests 5+ expansions back.


So if you play on TLP and need quest info , your shit out of luck. But for most of us, there is 99% information for everything you need from the sites I mentioned.


Sure ZAM, is nice to have cause it covers most everything on 1 website, but if you take a couple of seconds more , its all there pretty much on the other websites, just all scattered onto 4-5 other websites.

 

[qeytos]

Zam in back up

 

[SiegeTank]

Zam is back up and no point in beating a dead horse but, aspire, your comment about FOUR SITES providing everything you need from allakhazam says it all. First of all, allak has everything on one site, saving all the headaches of searching and secondly, what you claim isn't really true anyway. The depth of content on allakhazam trumps everything else. For example, often I get more useful info from the long list of user COMMENTS about a quest than I do from the official quest writeup on the site. Sure, eqresources has quest summaries but usually there are very few to zero user comments helping explain how some of the quest steps are best completed.

I do admit for hunting rare spawns I often use Magelo, which you don't mention, which provides an idea of how often the mob spawns and how often it drops what stuff. Of course, Magelo's info works off Lucy, I think, and Lucy is part of allakhazam.

Bottom line, though, there's no replacing allakhazam. It's good to hear that the problem was indeed a hardware failure and that they had good backups.

No, I don't own stock in ZAM and honestly I've had my own gripes about them. Like the mess their site can be in terms of popups and slowness, according to many non-sub users, if you don't pay for a premium sub. But they gotta make money somehow and since they lowered the premium sub price it's a no-brainer to subscribe if you care to make use of the site to any degree. Best deal for the money if you play EQ seriously.

Allakhazam's content SHOULD have been something Verant/Sony/DBG committed to having on EQ's own forums but that's ancient history. I don't think I've ever seen a game SO dependent on outside sources for its user documentation and "how to" guides.