Originally Posted by Phillipmcd1
(Post 17823357)
PlugRush/CamelMedia announcement:
Over the past months we've had some very though times. I'm gonna be straight about everything that has happened, and where we're at today.
In the past 3-4 months we've basically had our entire business shattered.
First epass went under, and we lost about 85% of the amount PlugRush publishers and advertisers had outstanding in their account.
Most our advertisers were paying us with epass, and most publishers wanted to get paid via epass. So it made sense to keep the money in the epass account.
That alone wasn't that big of a problem, we could recover from that, using funds from our other business and projects. For a while we did hope for the epass funds to be returned. But basically epass took our publishers money.
Next we got hit by the RCN accident on sept 15th, which is when Plugrush went down, along with our entire business.
All servers got wiped, everything deleted. We were paying for backups, but unfortunately it was going to take weeks to get all our servers restored, and some of our stuff wasn't backed up.
Slowly we got most of our operation back up and running. They had backups of everything, except the Plugrush source code, and all media on faceporn.com
The Plugrush database was backed up though. 2 weeks old. But we do have all users and transactions up until two weeks before the crash. After we had restored what we did have a backup of, and what we we're still able to make money from, we started working on PlugRush. This was probably a month after the incident.
We managed to restore most of the PlugRush source code from our local pc's. But there were some key parts of the system we didn't have a local copy of,
and we realized that some parts of it would have to be re-coded. We figured we should be able to get it coded, restored and setup in a couple of weeks. Which is what we posted in the threads.
Selling the system at this point wasn't really an option, as we still would have to spend weeks on restoring and coding it.
On the same day as the servers got wiped (sept 15th), facebook filed a lawsuit against us, which coincidentally made everyone think faceporn was taken down because of the lawsuit, when in reality it was because of the server got hacked. It got in newspapers all over the world.
During this time, our expenses piled up, and our income was declining. It had already been in decline after epass shut down, because everyone stopped spending money when epass was no longer an option.
There were times after this I though we weren't gonna make it, and our company would go bankrupt. We were down to $0 in our bank accounts at one point. I did not have a good feeling about things, and I really didn't want to face up to it, and have to admit defeat. We've worked way too long and hard on this for that to happen.
With all of this hanging over us, all of the pressure, distractions, dealing with lawyers, accountants, getting IM's, emails left and right, unpaid bills, lack of funds, it was pretty much impossible to focus on what we needed to, let alone actually sit down and code to get the site back up. It was all overwhelming.
At one point we really just needed to shut things out, and work hard on getting things done. One of the things we've had to do the past month has been to shut out distractions and focus on one thing at the time.
To be able to focus and stay motivated, one of the things we decided to do was to stop reading the forums, and shutting of IM's. Probably not the best decision, but the stress was overwhelming.
We've resolved a lot of our issues now, and we have slowly gotten back up from the gutter.
Over the past weeks, we've finally gotten a lot of important work done, and have definitely turned things around.
PlugRush is pretty much done coding wise, and could be up and running very soon.
We've started to make money again from our other projects.
We've cut our expenses and are sorting out the financial aspects.
We're not that far away from a solution that will enable us to pay everyone, and get the system back up, but we don't have all the funds available at this moment to pay everyone what they are owed, and we can't start paying out some and not all.
We do have assets to liquefy if we need to and are looking at what our best options are.
I'm sorry this all went down like this, and I wish I could have been better at communicating with everyone, but the fact is, in the middle of it all, there were times I really did not know what to tell people, With so many uncertainties and issues to resolve.
A lot of things could probably have been handled differently. This has been an extremely stressful time for us.
Realistically speaking, I don't think we're gonna be where we need to be until probably february. One thing I've learned is that things take a lot more time then you think they are going to take.
But I promise you all this: I'm gonna do what needs to be done to make this right, if that is still possible. People will at least get paid. That is my #1 priority at the moment. I'm not gonna pull a mallic. I don't expect our reputation to be restored for the time being, and I'm not sure how much potential PlugRush will have after this situation, or If people will want to trust us and use the system at all. We might need to start it as a 'trade only' system in the beginning.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have anticipated us getting fucked so bad in so many ways in such a short time.
I know this probably isn't what you all wanted to hear, but I hope you can all bear with us, and have patience a while longer.
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