what happened to the Madagroup forum of the AFC?

[sidguppy]

anyone knows?
the Madagroup forum of the AFc seems to have gone.
for those who haven't got an idea; this was a very useful forum set up by French enthousiasts of the AFC (French cichlidkeepers community), run by Michael Negrini who's also a visitor here, occasionally.

lots of experience and knowledge about the Madagascarian fish and also great pictures to be found

but it seems to have gone or maybe temporarily offline

anyone (other French fishkeepers) knows a bit more?
the reason I ask is that aside from me being a visitor there I'm trying to contact the others from that forum and now that's a bit hard.

I know there's probably more French fora, but my Francais est terrible and the AFC madagroup forum was bi-lingual.

[emartin]

????

It's online....

http://madagroup.francecichlid.com/?lng=en

http://madagroup.francecichlid.com/fortopic.php?lng=en

[sidguppy]

it ain't here.

the rest of the internet works just fine

odd

[Philippe Burnel]

Depending of the internet navigator you use, the web site of the french cichlid association doesn't work. And nobody seems to do something against this problem !

[sidguppy]

tnx for the info, Philippe!

I've always used Firefox or Mozilla; maybe the latest update of FF isn't accepted by the server that forum runs on?

I'll try IE then, still got it somewhere buried under a pile of data dust.


edit: damn. only have an old version of IE; 6.0 and that doesn't work either.


last option I have then is to borrow my friends' laptop; it's a Mac, so it doesn't run the usual browsers.

[Philippe Burnel]

I use firefox at home and it doesn't work.
I use firefox in my job.... and it works

[sidguppy]

checked and it turned out I missed a recent update from Firefox; did the update

tum da dum

nope.

this sucks, because until recently I could get on the forum just fine, regardless of wich computer I used or where I was.


did a few updates/installs etc:

firefox 3.0.15 nope, nada, zilch

IE (old version, can't update), rien

Opera 10.10 nothing

Safara for PC 4.0.4 zero

this is madness! apart from Windows, I have 3 other netbrowsers updated to the max and I can't get on the site

looks like some people have dropped the ball over there indeed

wich is a bloody shame, cause i wanted to let the guys in France know that I'm on the verge of laying my hand on a large group of baby fish that aren't available for them at the moment,
and I have no intention of keeping that specific fish just for me.

[sidguppy]

as a final act i'm typing now on the mac from a friend (I don't like Mac and I hate laptops; this one's both ), and the result of trying to get on the afc is unsuccesful.

ah well. I'll drop a pm to Michael and he can pass the word to the others


a big bummer though; it was a really nice orum.
good place to pratice my limited knowledge of the French language too

[Philippe Burnel]

Please try to mail to the french cichlid association.
I will not ! because when i do the answer is... there is no problem !

[sidguppy]

good suggestion

can you pm me their mail address?
for obvious reasons I can't get it off their internet site....

[emartin]

Have you guys tried clearing your browser cache and cookies, and rebooting your modem?

And if you are windows try this. Open up command prompt (go to (in Windows) to Start > Run > (type in cmd or command)) and in command prompt type in ping http://madagroup.francecichlid.com

After you get the results of that if it doesn't indicate that connections have been made to that address try ping http://francecichlid.com

And again if that doesn't work, try to connect directly to their IP address: ping http://217.16.4.60 <---note that isn't a direct link to their webpage but rather that is the server hosting the website. If that doesn't work or show up in a command prompt ping then it is down.

My guess is either your problems are either clientside with your modem's buffer/cache, your browser cache or your browsers cookies. Also, it could be NAMESERVER-side if the IP addresses work for you guys. What that would mean is your connection times out when it tries to access the nameserver containing the routing information of francecichlid.com (in other words, your browser/modem wouldn't know to connect to the actual IP address).... That's not exactly how it all works but it's the best I could explain in a simple manner.

If none of that stuff above works, then give them an email. Just send emails to every official address on their website until you get through to them LOL.

OR...... An alternative approach is to use a Proxy Server to connect to the website (this connects your computer to another computer to connect to a website).

Hope that helps,
~Ed

[Michael.NEGRINI]

Hi everybody,

I was unable to go to the Madagroup website for nearly two weeks. Today it seems to work just fine, even page loading is faster than ever !

[sidguppy]

hey Ed

it's a bit arrogant to say, but I do know what I'm doing....it wasn't browsercache or cookies or so.
we're running our own network here, server and all "rebooting" wont make the rest happy, especially not our IT wizard who's the jefe of all that stuff.

he keeps it in top notch. it was on the other end where it went down.

Hi, Michael!
it works indeed. looks like someone finally woke up and kicked the site awake again.
see you on the forum, got a wee question for ye all, since on this forum there's no trade section

[Philippe Burnel]

still out for me !

[sidguppy]

Philippe, i've sent em an email, we'll see what happens after that

hope they can read English (i know mr Hotton can), because attempting it in my limited knowledge of French would create a truly incomprehensible unreadable piece of text.

[Philippe Burnel]

(i know mr Hotton can)

I've heard that he's no more member of the AFC directory team, but JS (mail i've sent to you) speak english)

[emartin]

It had to be serverside then or name server side then.

I'm glad it's working for some of you now though!

[Philippe Burnel]

Philippe, i've sent em an email, we'll see what happens after that

Did you get any answer ?
I'm still unable to connect to the French cichlid association webste and as I didn't understand anything in emartin post...

[sidguppy]

yes I did, I got this mail:

Hi,

There is something wrong with the server of http://www.francecichlid.com (and madagroup.francecichlid.com)

I'm looking for a fix.

Thank for your email.

Regards,

JS.

mail originated from someone or a sig called 'AGA AGA'

the initials JS don't ring a bell, but then I'm not familiar with most people of the AFC


and as of today, I can't get on the site....again.

ah well, at least I got in touch with Michael and I'll be housekeeping a bunch of Katria's for him as soon as I can pick em up in Germany at Peter's place

[Philippe Burnel]

JS (Jean-Sébastien) = AGA (is login in many forums) is the wabmaster.