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 :)
Hi, I am the owner and sys admin at endedtvseries.com. We love TVrage, and hope they are able to overcome these obstacles. If we can do anything Please let us know.
Ditto. Still, what a betrayal this lack of information constitutes. Absolutely scandalous. But, perhaps, the best thing that happened to TVMaze! (I jest, of course. I now consider TVMaze to be the continuation of TVRage, just as it was for TVTome.) Again, it is the lack of effort on the part of TVRage's leadership (whomever these mysterious, mystical @bensomething21-last-twitter-post-in-F'ing-September being/s may or may not... be). But giving us zero info. That's just feels like an indecent act. I cannot stress, then, how poorly it reflects on whomever is directly complicit behind this betrayal of an inaction...
Hi there
I've an offline cache of tvrage.com, about 1.2GB of wget's of each id-<nos> page if that's any use?
Paul
hmm now I hear rumors that the owner is about to sell up. which is strange because nobody else could seem to get in contact.
anyway I wonder if all the old tvrage data is included in the sale, since that database is more valuable than just some second-hand recycled domain name?
I was the editor of a few guides on tvrage, and I have some recaps on my hard drive in openoffice format. You are more than welcome to them if you want them. Let me know.
So, TVRage goes dark for some mysterious reason, the owners and others associated provide no clear explanation and they can't even be bothered with posting a static page to explain what's happening. This is a serious slap in the face to people who have contributed time and data to the site and who depend on it.
I think that this is unacceptable. The owner has abused the trust and loyalty of the site's users. He should make the database publicly available and let somebody else carry on.
was really angry that TV rage went down without warning due to the information I submitted about shows- aka character profiles etc. However I have been a member of the site for less than 24 hours and found it easier to navigate and easier to submit already. I only want tv rage to return now so I can get back all the information I submitted and transfer to here!
Hi Kernelpanic,
Thanks for responding with some information in regards to the situation. I've updated the blog with your response and mailed you as well.
cheers,
Jan
Hi, I have no idea how the rumours started, I think it went from my conversation with the guy from SickRage about why TVRage was dead, I am the ex-tvrage sysadmin the blog post above is talking about by the way, and from there it went on reddit to go viral I guess.
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 :)
If you would ask me, I'd tell you to stay here, and this opinion doesn't have anything to do with the conflicts I have with the TVRage owner, but just that it's better to stay on a website that has a rich feature set that serves the community/visitor which is what TVMaze is, for that I compliment the coders, especially for features like these "http://www.tvmaze.com/site/features" that was and is really necessary, more analytics :)
Cheers.
I hope TVRage comes back, but mostly so that TVmaze can get some of the data that was on there.
Not going back for sure, and not because of the downtime, but because of the lack of information.