News about MagWeb

This announcement was posted a few days ago on TMP, and I hope not to commit capital offense in reporting it verbatim:

The MagWeb server is still off line, and support@ and magweb@ e-mails to our server will only bounce. I don't have an ETA on getting MagWeb back up and running, but I know that when it does get back online, it will be in a different format. We've found that we just can't rebuild something this large built over the last 13 years in just a few months.

As MagWeb has not been updated since the end of September, we here at MagWeb agreed that we should offer a refund to members' credit cards for the unused portions (October onward) of memberships. Our guru, Tibor, has done most of the work, and this will appear as a credit on your next Visa or Mastercard statement -- anywhere from $4.08 USD on up depending on when you joined.

So, I'll apologize (once again) for any inconvenience and thank you (once again) for all your support of MagWeb past, present, and future. I'll also try to cruise TMP more, or at least the "Websites for Wargaming" section.

Feel free to point folks to this message in TMP or repost this message elsewhere on the web.

As always, if you need to reach me, you can at my home e-mail address: [omissis]

Russ

Russ Lockwood
CEO, MagWeb.com

For those of you not familiar with the site, MagWeb is a fantastic online archive of wargaming magazines, some of them dating back to the '60s. In particular, I am very fond of The Courier, the magazine that basically re-started me into miniatures wargaming in my early '20s: I believe that the full text (and most maps and figures) from the publication are available online through MagWeb, from the first issue in 1979 to the last one in 2005. Also, MagWeb preserves the electronic archive of the Midwest Wargamers Association Newsletter, MWAN for short, a magazine that had -- and still has -- cult-like following among wargamers, and to this day reference for generations of players, a few years after its demise also in 2005 (clearly, a hell of an annus horribilis for wargaming publications...)

Unfortunately, I believe MagWeb was a victim of the extended flooding in the Midwest last year, which knocked its server down with severe loss of functionality. To this day, I can still have access to the information, but the search engine function has never been fully restored.

All I can hope for is that Russ will soon restore the site to its full capacity. If you have never subscribed to MagWeb before, you should plan to invest a few dollars into this service as soon as they will be back: it is money well spent!