Just picked this up from the TLU blog (http://tlublog.blogspot.com/) and it's visible if you have to login to the site as well.
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Wednesday, July 9, 2008
MediaMax / The Linkup is closing
We regret to inform you that we will be closing The Linkup service on Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.The Linkup is no longer accepting any uploads or new accounts, and no further charges will be made to your credit card. After August 8, your account will not be accessible, all your personal information will be deleted (username, billing information, history, etc), and your files will be deleted. Please download any files that are in your account that you wish to keep before Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers.We are very sorry that we have not been able to rebuild our service as we had envisioned. We sincerely appreciate those of you who stuck by us and held out hope for the return of a great service, and apologize that things did not work out better. And also a special thanks and apology to those developers who have been developing applications on The Linkup API that can no longer be supported.Sincerely,The Linkup Team
Posted by Team Linkup at 12:41 AM
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Well, I suppose some people will be glad to see them finally go under. Personally I feel sad for the people, like me, that hoped they would pull through as we had so much invested in them that there really wasn't an alternative. For me it means the work of about 6 years of collecting nearly every anime / manga and Jdrama release and putting it on Streamload -> MediaMax - > TheLinkUp just went out of the window. Everything we have done to try and make it work is in the end all for nothing.
To me it looks they at first were a victim of their succes (Streamload) and when they tried to built a system that could continue to carry the load (MediaMax followed by TLU) they made some monumental bad decisions and plainly weren't up to the task at hand. This they coupled with an attitude of downplaying and stonewalling problems with an apology here and there to not alienate every customer they had. I had really hoped when they announced TLU and actually let their user participate in the development and testing that things would turn out alright in the end, but it seems that as with MediaMax, TLU, or rather the people behind it, have not been up to the task and were unable to give us what we wanted, needed and basically something that could be expected of a company that is supposed to deliver a good product.
To add injury to insult them cutting off the system at the mentioned date will mean a lot of users have paid for a subscription that was supposed to last longer then it now will and I didn't see a word about restituting at least some of subscription fees.
WillTRiker
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2 comments:
You could say that I'm feeling *almost* relieved that they are closing and that they *say* they are not charging any more cards as I was worrying that they would attempt to charge mine anyway.
So I guess we will see in a few days whether that's true or not.
It's a shame that they didn't stick to Streamload. I still miss that place, even though it had it's fair share of problems.
I'm sorry that you lost your files and having bad experience with MediaMax. I used to have a MediaMax account long time ago (year and a half ago). I'd lost some of the files on it and I have trouble accessing my files and some of them getting corrupted and I've caught them overcharged me twice. They refunded my money back after I raised hell about it. Anyway, one of my friends who is a police officer gave me a Pentium 3 (700-800mhz) Gateway desktop tower system with 512MB of memory (maxed out). I'd updated the BIOS and add a bigger hard drive and turn the computer into a FreeNAS server to access the files (remotely) anywhere (pretty cool, huh?). I went to www.freenas.org and download the CD image and burned it on the CD-RW disc and install it. This is my first UNIX server and I configured the FreeNAS server to email me everyday because the DSL connection the server is on running, the IP addresses change frequently. I need the current IP address to access the server using SSH (secure shell) program to access the files on it. Guess what, it is free, secure, and the server been running for about four months now so far. The FreeNAS server is in the office at the police station. One more thing, FreeNAS stand for free Network-Attached Storage server.
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