As of today, our new Orpheus IRC is open to the public. This server runs on a more stable host than irc.apollo.rip and has a valid SSL certificate. We encourage everyone to join irc.orpheus.network, register their username with nickserv, and leave Apollo as soon as possible. Staff will deal with questions asked in irc.apollo.rip on a best-effort basis from this point on. The Apollo server will run until the next payment is due, some time around the 25th of October.
irc.orpheus.networkPort: +7000 for SSL (6667 for non-SSL)Channel: #help. SSL connections are strongly recommended.
You will be happy to hear that there has been a lot of progress on the relaunch of our beloved site. As of now, Gazelle and Ocelot are running, and everything is locked down. Importing the old database, however, has proven more difficult than originally anticipated.
The backup was in the form of tab-separated text files, with no care taken to delimit anything. Any row with a field (or worse, serveral fields) containing multi-line text data, double quotes or tab characters causes the Mysql import to fail. Spine has been working relentlessly around the clock to parse the data, clean it up and import the tables without error. Everything is going well, if slowly, and no data will be lost. As this is taking much more time than we originally expected, we cannot even begin to test migrating and will have to extend our launch date a little bit.
We will be giving early access to some of the biggest uploaders of Apollo (from both before and after the backup date), the Interview team, Charlie team, FLS team and the Archive team. This early access is not meant to give them an (unfair) advantage, but to ensure that the majority of the torrents are seeded at the official launch, and that these uploaders get the chance to re-upload their own rips that have been lost due to the age of the backup. The duration of this early access will be approximately one week. Shorter if we don't discover any bugs, or longer if we encounter unforseen errors.
Staff will decide on who receive early access and who don't. We will contact you, please don't ask for it.
We will continue to post updates here as we make progress. See you on IRC!
Athena, Spine and the rest of the Orpheus crew.
PS: yes, the above logo is a placeholder, hacked up in ten minutes using Gimp.
Although we never had access to any of the main Apollo servers or the domain, one of our staff had access to the IRC server. While browsing this server out of curiosity (Athena was bored), we stumbled upon a full site backup that was taken in June 2017. That is a long time ago, but we estimate that this backup still contains about 70% of all current torrents, and about 80% of all current users. We have secured this backup, and have confirmed that it is intact.
With this backup, it will be possible to revive a large part of the site with relative ease. Our current plan is to start from scratch, and to use this old database to regain the userbase and torrents. If you were a member of Apollo as of mid-june 2017, you will be able to receive an invite to Orpheus on the email address you used for Apollo. We will publish the details when the site launches. Stats (buffer, amount of uploads, notifications, ...) will be transferred to Orpheus as well.
Many people acquired huge amounts of buffer during the initial global freeleech and this created serious distortion in the economy. This will be redressed after we have crunched the numbers. While some people will lose varying amounts of buffer, they will still be in a comfortable position to participate in the economy.
If you signed up to Orpheus later, we will provide other options which to allow you to receive an account. You will need your original invitation email (if the email server was working at the time) or a screen shot of your profile page.
There will be no open signups.
The new site will start without any torrents, but as soon as you begin to seed your Apollo torrents on the new tracker, torrents that appear in the 2017 database will automatically be added to the site. This way, there will no dead torrents from the old site. We are developing a GUI tool that will work on all operating systems and with most popular clients, to mass-change all Apollo tracker URLs to Orpheus tracker URLs. A CLI tool for seedboxes and servers will also be provided.
We still hope that the original sysops will make the final database dump available to us. If that happens, we will replace the 2017 database with the newer one, allowing more members to join easily and more torrents to be rescued.
The ETA for getting the site up from this point is 2 weeks. We realize that this is a week longer than originally planned, but a lot of code needs to be written and tested in order to ensure a smooth transition.
As you have all noticed, Apollo.rip has been down for about a month now. This is due to the personal circumstances of both original sysops, O and W. Because of these circumstances (we won't go into it here for their privacy), it was not possible for them to pay the server bills on time. This resulted in the host shutting down our backend server, and eventually, wiping everything on it.
However, there is hope. Before the backend server (which contained the site code and database) was wiped, O and W were able to make a backup which is currently in their posession. They have agreed on giving this backup to the remaining staff. However, due to the aforementioned circumstances, we are not sure how long that will take. We are confident that it will happen though since we've had contact with O multiple times during the last 3 weeks.
Even though we cannot give you an exact ETA on when we will receive the backup, we can give you an ETA on how long it will take for us to revive the site after receiving it, which will be approximately 7 days. 7 days might sound like a long time, but it isn't, considering that we all have jobs and this new server infrastructure will be quite complicated to ensure maximum security.
Spine and Athena will be the new sysops and leaders of Apollo.rip, which will be rebranded to Orpheus.network. TheGodParticle will remain administrator and staff leader while itismadness will continue their duties as lead developer. Most of the staff will also stay aboard with some new additions. O and W have stated their desire to move on. We wish them well.
We are not asking for your donations. We understand that many of you might be upset, which is why we are funding this ourselves. CloudFlare will be gone (It already is; resolve the DNS if you want) and we are making no compromises on security.
We will be updating this site as soon as we have news regarding the database, the site, and any ETAs. If you have any questions, or if you just need a chat, you can join our IRC network:
irc.apollo.rip port +7000 for SSL (6667 for non-SSL) #help
Please hang on and keep your torrents in your client, you will need them again!
Sincerely, Orpheus.network Staff