Family Historian User Group

Here's what Ancestry has to say about the matter:

http://help.ancestry.com/app/answers/de ... /a_id/9284

Rootsweb is experiencing some temporary site problems. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. Our development and web operations teams are working on the problem and we will have it resolved as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

This unhelpful message has been up since Wednesday, according to this post by the blogger The Ancestry Insider:

RootsWeb Update: Still Down and No Known Resolution Date

RootsWeb has now been down for over two days. It went down before 4pm MST on Wednesday, 24 February 2016.

Since the entire site seems to be down, I would guess that also includes ALL of the mailing lists (hundreds, if not more) hosted there included FHU-L. The last message I received from FHU-L was from Arthur & Pauline Kennedy, timestamped Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:48 AM, subject Re: [FHU] Thousands of sources?

I want to say thank you to Jane for this forum, to Jane and Mike Tate especially for all their contributions here and on the list, and to all of you who have contributed here and to FHU-L.

I hope that this is just a temporary glitch, and not the first sign of a catastrophe -- but seeing what Ancestry's stewardship of Genealogy.com has been, I am not reassured by their message.

P.S. Jane, I'm assuming all the mods of the RootsWeb mailing lists are in the dark as much as we users are. My sympathies -- this has to be much more annoying for all of you than it is for the user base.

Sorry I know no more than you on this one. I can only assume it's some sort of Cyber attack, but I would have thought a slightly better message could have been done by now!

The past few days Ancestry's 'Communities' lists online at the main site have had all posted text changed to Asian characters. As Ancestry 'fixes' the character display problem, the next day the problem is back. The problem seems to be limited to the Communities lists at the main Ancestry site and RootsWeb. At a guess I suspect Ancestry's servers are being hit by a hack again as happened a year or so ago.

This message went up a few days ago:

We're currently experiencing a temporary website outage due to Rootsweb hardware failure. Rest assured, our development and web operations teams are busy working to securely restore the site as quickly as possible.

Our initial expectation is to have the site back up and running on or around March 15, 2016.

We apologize for the disruption and thank-you for your patience. We will provide other updates here as we have them.

Thanks for the info, Denise. I had seen people on Twitter wondering if this was another DDOS attack.

Moral of the story: if you see something online like a mailing list message or a message board or forum post and the information is important to you, make a local copy and add it to your research notes. No matter how much Ancestry or any other online service would like to encourage us to believe we can always just log in and have all our stuff there, it isn't so.

Just to add to the moral. If you ever find a page you linked to "gone", don't forget you might just find it on the Web archive. I have been using it a lot lately to search out old web sites from the early 2000's

http://web.archive.org

There is also a useful plugin for Chrome which allows you to quickly jump to the archive for a missing page.

While I am still seeing the message on the RootsWeb main page about the expected recovery date of 16 March, some functionality is back.

In particular -- the most important part is back.

I received messages on both FHU-L and Devon-L this morning.