Hip Pocket Aeronautics Forums Down

[GallopingGhostler]

For the past 10 days, when attempting to access their forums, I receive this message:


The rest of Hip Pocket is working except the forums. I have E-mailed Bruce Feaver and their web master. Both use Hip Pocket E-mail addresses.

Bruce lives in Canada. It is possible with the forums down, so is their messaging system. Does anyone know how to get a hold of him, or to contact him personally and let him know?

[rdw777]

I’ve noticed it down too…. I hope it can be recovered…. A world of valuable FF info there.., I was flying catapult gliders about 10 years ago and got a lot of trimming help from that group

[Levent Suberk]

It is said that site admin passed away. Another admin has been trying to continue forums within several days.

[rsv1cox]

In my cloistered world I never heard of them...............

I gotta get out more.

[GallopingGhostler]

Thanks to any who may have contacted the other admins to Hip Pocket. I just received the following reply today from Bruce Feaver's E-mail:



My condolences to the family of the main admin.  

Hopefully, Sundance12 will be able to restore the forums. It has followings in all model aircraft, but particularly the free flight crowd spend a lot of time there, lots of neat photos and videos, plus the archives have all sorts of aircraft and magazines, too.

Follow up, just got this reply:

Re: Fw: Hip Pocket Forum is down
Date Saturday, October 21st, 2023 at 11:57S

Yes
And that is because the main admin passed away.
I am doing my best to restore

BF

Are you aware that your forums are crashed for the past 10 days?

[Admin]

I'm sorry to hear about the passing of their admin. I'll be honest, I haven't heard of that forum before.


Just so you know, if I were to ever "disappear", there are mechanisms in place where one could take over the forum by contacting Forumotion.

[GallopingGhostler]

Thanks, Levent for the advanced notice of what happened prior to my receiving a reply from their alternate Admin.

I'll be honest, I haven't heard of that forum before.

It is an interesting and active forum. Most of those who frequently it do rubber powered aircraft of all types, with a variety of international posters similar to CEF, and like CEF it caters to all topics related to model aircraft.

Just so you know, if I were to ever "disappear", there are mechanisms in place where one could take over the forum by contacting Forumotion.

Sort of a forum's "dead man's brake?"

Wikipedia, Dead man's switch

[GallopingGhostler]

Just found out that Bruce (Ratz) has gotten the forum up and running again. He requests any messaging be done in the general forum. Once he is able to get all the backups loaded to restore the threads database, then that posted will be deleted. But, I am glad that he was finally able to fix things, and hopefully in a couple days, Hip Pocket will be whole again.

Correction: Sundance12, alternate Admin was using the late Bruce (Ratz)'s account to message all. Until all up and running, messaging as best as possible using the super-Admin account.

[Mike1484]

Thanks for the heads up. Good forum for all to visit.
 Mike1484

[944_Jim]

Wonderful news! I think there was some tension several years ago between HPA and Outerzone as both had some of the same plans. There are quite few on each with no overlap, so I was dreading the demise of HPA.

I didn't like the format of Stuka Stunt Works (SSW), but I enjoyed reading/researching old answers to older problems there. The membership did have some contention, so that part wasn't so wonderful. Sadly, the Wayback Machine Internet Archive didn't get much of SSW.

Time to go harvest what I want in case it disappears for good.

[GallopingGhostler]

During the HPA forums crash, the plans side and publications side (magazines and books) were not affected.

HPA has plans and books the Outerzone doesn't, and as such I have benefitted from their downloads.

Yes, I have found it necessary to download and save them to my archives, because electronic media doesn't last. I have even resorted to buying the books used in paper form, because they don't disappear if the electronic media fails, or is so obsoleted that you not longer can obtain devices to read them (for example, floppy and computer tape media).

Stuka Stunt used older software from the DOS and Windows 3.1 days. Problem was I gather, is that the proprietor was aging and lost his technical support. He asked me if I could help, but unfortunately the software's age plus I left working software with my Douglas days back in the late 1980's.

[rdw777]

Thanks for the update George…. I was making catapult gliders about 10 years ago and got a lot of help from HPA members to learn how to trim them…

[GallopingGhostler]

You're welcome, Robert. Regarding saving plans and info, also Brotherhood of the Ring (BOTR) is no longer with us. It went off-line maybe 4 or 5 years ago. It had a lot of interesting info regarding C/L, plans, engines, techniques, Ringmaster variants, etc.

Used to have a lot of interesting forums:

Thus, posting on HPA was also nice and different from social media.

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