Coinpeople was a victim of it's own success. This has happened to coin sites before now and i'm sorry to say it'll probably happen again. CP was a good site though and it's removal is a loss to the coin collecting fraternity.
I received an e-mail from Stu. I have posted part of it here. http://forums.numismatic-playground.com/viewtopic.php?t=81 For the CP who didn't know, that's SMS's new site. Tiff
Crying shame. I just hope CoinPeople doesn't go out like NumisAddict.com did. That would be even worse.
The Areas for silly post and General post ans Debate made it unique among Coin site and The Social life of the site was very special to so many and we will miss the Auction Area. I hope Art survives that one. . .
With his reference to "limited budget", I wonder if this is something that could be fixed if we all sent in a donation. Does anybody have an idea of what kind of money this would take ? I don't. I suspect he's dejected over losing all of those posts and history. However, when he gets over that shock he might be interested in restarting if he had the resources. People here who know him much better than I will be able to give a better idea of whether this is feasible.
Was thinking along those same lines about raising cash for the site. Let me see if I can contact him and see what he says.
I made that suggestion to Stu a couple of times. The software is $160 retail, though. That's before the time you put into it and server fees (both of which go with whatever software you're using). It's hard to understand the server issues until you're getting tons of traffic like Stu's forum did, and whether you have vBulletin or phpBB you still have to admin the server.
I've got coins worth that much (almost). If only a hundred people who used his site frequently each sent in $10, he'd have $1000 to get started. I would think there would be a hundred people for whom $10 would be a bargain for what they get back in return. I'd send him $10 and I only made about four posts total over there, but I enjoyed reading the other posts. Makes you appreciate what you've got. Thanks, Peter, for making this site available.
Hehe, in fact I've been funding CoinTalk by selling off bits of my collection. I don't know if Stu's interested in taking donations from CoinPeople members, but it's an honorable thing to do, IMO.
Somehow i don't think Stujoe would accept donations. It'd be worth a try but i can't see it happening.
FYI - the link to the site http://www.coinpeople.com/forums/ will bring up a page now with a message from Stu.
I can't get that page up. . . But I do get a message at this one. . http://host116.ipowerweb.com/~coinpeop/
Good suggestion Rodney, the site not coming up is just because its in the middle of a DNS update (meaning Stu switched the domain to point at a different server). When it perculates through the net, everyone will find it works.