After 100 hours of outage time, tristatecarz is finally back online. I'm sure most of you are wondering just what in the hell happened to cause the website to go offline for almost 5 days, so I will fill you in on the details that I am aware of.

Saturday 5/31 at about 5:45pm, The Planet (our webhost) experienced a major explosion/fire in the power room. This explosion damaged a lot of the power wires throughout the H1 datacenter, and took all of the servers offline. As a result of the extensive damage, the fire department advised them not to engage backup power generators until the damage could be assessed.

Sometime the following day, the backup generators were powered on and power was restored to the second level of the datacenter. Crews were still working to try and restore power to the first level of the datacenter, and were running into some problems. They had backup generators started for the first level, and those failed. After trying to repair the generators, they finally decided to replace them.

Now, up to current day, the first level of the datacenter is operating on backup generator power. It will take approximately a week and a half to rebuild the power center, and get everything back on permanent power. Until then, i'm sure there will be a bunch of problems for the techs to resolve, namely with servers still not functioning.

As of right now, the server that tristatecarz was hosted on is still unresponsive. It appears as if it is powered up, but something isn't right. For the time being, 88crxvtec has offered to allow me to host the website on his hosting, so that we can all get our daily fix of tristatecarz. The database has been restored back to 4/15/08 (most recent backup), and as soon as the other server returns to operation, I will attempt to recover all lost posts between 4/15 and 5/31.

Sorry for being gone for so long, but hopefully this will be the last of the outage.

Due to the high number of spambots trying to register, and the recent amount of idiots that feel the need to spam the forums with fake user names, I have banned just about every single domain that's not hosted in the United States. I have also locked down yahoo.com, gmail.com, and hotmail.com e-mail addresses.

Basically, this means that you must either use a valid e-mail address that isn't one of the above, or you will have to e-mail us to have your username registered. If we quit getting the flurry of people trying to spam the forums, I will once again unlock yahoo, gmail, and hotmail. Until then, sorry.

BTW, this does not effect anyone that is already registered on the forums.

*edit* yahoo, hotmail, and gmail are allowed again...but highly monitored. i've killed a lot of the bots so far, and still working to eliminate the rest. a few weeks ago, we had anywhere from 40-50 per day trying to register on the forums...we're down to about 3-4 a day now

Well, due to something happening with the server that is still unknown, the database has been corrupted, and the entire server was wiped out and started from scratch. I had a backup from 11/2 that was recovered, but any posts/users since 11/2 have been deleted.

If you joined on or after 11/2, please rejoin the forums. If you have a post that you need recreated, please create it again.

Sorry for the problems, but alas, we are back up and running!