Guestbook.de 結束了11年的免費留言板服務

今天赫然發現使用了11年的SPiN免費留言板服務 (guestbook.de) 竟已終止服務了！
1996年起，我開始從事網頁設計的工作，也從那一年開始在個人網頁中使用 SPiN (guestbook.de) 所提供的免費留言板服務，我在 SPiN 申請的免費留言板將近40個；除了自己愛用之外，更推薦了很多朋友使用，我相信應該也有不少網友經由我的網站接觸了 SPiN 的留言板，進而使用它。



很遺憾地，今年九月中旬，SPiN 決定結束其免費留言板服務，並轉型為社群服務網站 (spin.de) 。下面是 SPiN 在9月14日發佈的公告，正式宣告長達11年的免費留言板服務將走入歷史。

Fri, 14 Sep 2007, ongoing (Philemon)

• Today I have sad news. The guestbook service will be discontinued.It'sbeen 11 years now. Those of you who have been with us for a long timeknow us for taking quality seriously. With the years, a lot of thingshappened and some years ago focus changed away from the guestbookservice. We did not want that to affect you too much and so continuedto provide the service for you. But for some time now, we have come toa point where our high quality of standards cannot be met with theresources available to the guestbook service. That is why we have cometo this decision.
  Let me explain the timeline: (current step is bold)
  
  
  1. Add possibility to download the guestbook entries as dump. -> done on 2007-09-14
  2. Add link to download guestbook dump to Control-Center -> done on 2007-09-19
  3. Wait at least 2 weeks -> done on 2007-10-03
  4. Disable posting of new entries -> done on 2007-10-04
  5. Wait at least 2 weeks -> done on 2007-10-18
  6. Replace guestbook's by download link -> done on 2007-10-24
  7. Wait at least 4 weeks
  8. Shut service down.
     
     
  Thistimeline is chosen to have a balance between discontinuing the serviceand giving you the opportunity to handle the situation, i.e. save theentries, maybe smoothly transfer to a different service and so on.There is a time window of 2 weeks during which the service is notaffected at all. Another 2 weeks with only posting being disabled. Onlyafter a month the guestbook pages will be replaced, that should givemost users the chance to react.
  You find the link to download the mentioned guestbook dump on your Control-Center, which is linked to from the bottom of your guestbook in all default styles.
  Update:Thank you for all your offers (e.g. giving a one-time or yearlydonations) and suggestions, but rest assured that we spent quite sometime to consider all options over the course of the last couple ofyears, and none satisfied our ambitions. From a solution we expect morethan being able to run the service for another year or two (been there,done that), but to enable us to envision a future another 11 years fromnow.

目前 SPiN 提供了「下載留言」的服務，有使用 guestbook.de 服務的朋友，請記得盡快連上你的留言板，將過往留言下載到電腦裡。這個服務應該會提供到11月中旬，慢了可能就來不及囉！