It's been two weeks since tvrage.com suddenly went offline. For those of you who didn't know it, tvrage was a crowdsourced database full of TV information - somewhat like TVmaze itself. Tvrage was created over 10 years ago by a group of people using the data from a site called tvtome when tvtome was sold to a different company and slowly started to disappear. After these many years of collective editing, tvrage contained a wealth of information; we ourselves have more than once thankfully used it as a resource while researching TV shows.
The sudden disappearance of tvrage has been quite a mystery: there haven't been any announcements on the site, on their twitter, facebook page, or anywhere else. Because of this, in the past week a lot of people have turned to us for answers. We've been talking to a lot of people, including former tvrage staff members and editors, and while we have heard a couple of variants on a story about a conflict between the site owner and its system administrator, the recurring theme appears to be that the only person with answers has simply vanished without leaving a clue about the situation to anyone. After two weeks of this it's hard to conclude anything other than tvrage not coming back online.
The people we talked with expressed their particular concerns about the loss of all the data they had contributed to tvrage over the years: hand-written episode summaries, recaps, quotes, cultural references, cast- and crew credits and much more. We have now started an effort to salvage as much of this data as possible. Since last week, we've been collecting tvrage data from many different sources: the Cloudflare cache, the Google cache, archive.org, etcetera. We also found a few people who still had a large set of cached data from the tvrage API available on their computers.
We hope to be able to combine all these different data sets, sanitize the data, and recover a large amount of the content that was once submitted to tvrage. If we succeed, we aim to make this data publicly available so it can be retrieved again by their original authors, who can then re-add it to TVmaze or other databases if they wish to do so. Don't get your hopes up just yet though, all of this is still pending a lot of hard work and further research on the legal consequences.
Expect an update on this situation in a few weeks from now. In the mean time, if you have access to any cached tvrage data and want to join our effort, please reach out using the site, social media or email: contact at tvmaze dot com.
tl;dr: We have started an effort to restore years of contributed data from users on tvrage.com and will do our best to make it publicly available if we succeed.
UPDATE (17 OCT 2015)
The former tvrage sysadmin (kernelpanic) posted the following response in the comments:
Anyway, the last email I got from the owner was that he was going to
sell the domain name "tvrage.com" and that he was quitting, because he
was sick and tired of everything, and yes the 'everything' part is a
long story and is something he needs to figure out by himself.
On the
other hand there are rumours that it's going to be back, but that is
something you'd have to be willing to wait for.. if you are really eager
for TVRage, I don't really care :)
I'm certainly pleased that this proposed plan could be a labour of time, as that would be a necessity to guarantee that TVRage is officially deceased before seizing their material. One could only imagine the situation of having all of their data only for them to come back in the state in which they left. I foresee that as being most awkward on your part. Still, it does make the analogy of graverobbery not an unwarranted one.
My concern would be more in the regard to simplistic data such as cast/crew credits and quotes. Summaries of shows and episodes can be buried with TVRage. I take pride in those and I don't want them just copy-and-pasted. I loathed it even when I saw that they were on other sites that couldn't be arsed to come up with their own and when I took a guide, I rewrote them to make sure I knew they were original. I took pride in that. If my voice carried any weight in the matter, I would request those I wrote be left behind.
For those wanting to integrate with TVMaze who were previously using TVRage, you can query the API using a TVRage ID like this:
http://api.tvmaze.com/lookup/shows?tvrage=TVRageID
the site manager of TVRage is @BenDrummond21 on twitter. He's indicating that it's some sort of failure but the site plans to come back up. He's on leave for a few days and hoping to update everyone on his return.
i must admit, however, that it's been over 10 days now and his comments don't seem to inspire much confidence. nobody seems to know the real story and whether there is another underlying factor such as the site going down due to financial hosting problems or similar. we just have to guess what's happened.
in any event, it's probably a wise move to consider moving on. the major issue many people have is those who use the tvrage API to integrate with other products.
will the tvrage numbering system be maintained in the work that tvmaze is doing? and will there be a compatible API or will we have to re-work products?
hope it works, good luck.
I only found out about this website whilst trolling the internet - reddit - for answers about TVRage. Within a day, TVMaze has taken the place of TVRage on my bookmark toolbar. It's fresh, clean, and mobile friendly. Keep up the great work