What happened to Gamerankings.com?

[Gratch]

For the last 2 days, Gamerankings.com has had this message up:

We're sorry, we are temporarily offline. We'll be back as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, please visit one of our sister sites like MetaCritic.com or GameSpot.com.

I hope they're not gone.  I liked their review compilation system a lot better than MetaCritic's. 

[Moatman]

About 2 weeks ago, last week in march, my WoW account got hacked and I wasn't sure how.  None of my virus scanning software could find anything(I normally don't run a resident scan, since I'm pretty safe surfing, in terms of sites I visit these days) and I was perplexed. 

After doing a line-by-line scan of my Hijackthis log, I found LR32_b.exe and discovered it was a keylogger.  Upon further investigation I found this link: http://www.dpfiles.com/showthread.php?p=7100 and it's the only place I found this claim, but I did visit gamerankings the very night I started getting crash problems, the account was hacked the very next day. 

I don't know if it's a real claim or not(and the lr32_a is the win98 version, b seems to be the xp version due to how the registry works versus the autoexe.bat of old) but I've avoided going to the site again and been made paranoid into running a resident virus scanner for now...I've never felt the need to have one in over 10 years of being online and never ran into a virus issue like this, just the typical spyware/adware crap.

Thankfully, the wow hacking thing was just on a server I used to play on, they looted whatever minor money I had and got the items from the characters sold and took the money...blizzard does replace things like that, but eh.  Glad that I had 8 characters on that server and only 2 on the one I'm level 70 on now, the other one was at the top of the servers list and probably looked like my active server(the last server played on setting is stored client side)

[Knightshade Dragon]

For the last 2 days, Gamerankings.com has had this message up:

We're sorry, we are temporarily offline. We'll be back as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, please visit one of our sister sites like MetaCritic.com or GameSpot.com.

I hope they're not gone.  I liked their review compilation system a lot better than MetaCritic's. 

They've been having some serious SQL problems lately, so I'm hoping they are getting a bit of a refresh and rebuild.  I like their site as well.

[Eduardo X]

For the last 2 days, Gamerankings.com has had this message up:

We're sorry, we are temporarily offline. We'll be back as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, please visit one of our sister sites like MetaCritic.com or GameSpot.com.

I hope they're not gone.  I liked their review compilation system a lot better than MetaCritic's. 

They've been having some serious SQL problems lately, so I'm hoping they are getting a bit of a refresh and rebuild.  I like their site as well.

They pissed me off good when they delisted all the independent sites with under 100 reviews for 1 system or 300 for all systems, including my precious Bovine Conspiracy. It just makes gaming a more centralized community, dependent on a small number of companies' reviews to inform the public about what's good.
Balls to them. BALLS.

[Knightshade Dragon]

For the last 2 days, Gamerankings.com has had this message up:

We're sorry, we are temporarily offline. We'll be back as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, please visit one of our sister sites like MetaCritic.com or GameSpot.com.

I hope they're not gone.  I liked their review compilation system a lot better than MetaCritic's. 

They've been having some serious SQL problems lately, so I'm hoping they are getting a bit of a refresh and rebuild.  I like their site as well.

They pissed me off good when they delisted all the independent sites with under 100 reviews for 1 system or 300 for all systems, including my precious Bovine Conspiracy. It just makes gaming a more centralized community, dependent on a small number of companies' reviews to inform the public about what's good.
Balls to them. BALLS.

You can understand why though, yea?  Have you looked at some of these 'independent' sites?  Every game is 100 and teh best game evarr!!11lolerskatesroflecopter!!1!   It really throws off the legitimate stuff.

[Eduardo X]

For the last 2 days, Gamerankings.com has had this message up:

We're sorry, we are temporarily offline. We'll be back as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, please visit one of our sister sites like MetaCritic.com or GameSpot.com.

I hope they're not gone.  I liked their review compilation system a lot better than MetaCritic's. 

They've been having some serious SQL problems lately, so I'm hoping they are getting a bit of a refresh and rebuild.  I like their site as well.

They pissed me off good when they delisted all the independent sites with under 100 reviews for 1 system or 300 for all systems, including my precious Bovine Conspiracy. It just makes gaming a more centralized community, dependent on a small number of companies' reviews to inform the public about what's good.
Balls to them. BALLS.

You can understand why though, yea?  Have you looked at some of these 'independent' sites?  Every game is 100 and teh best game evarr!!11lolerskatesroflecopter!!1!   It really throws off the legitimate stuff.

I can agree with that. But stuff like Gametunnel got taken off, which I find to be a great site for reviews and what not.
Also, some of the sites that are still on there are still like this. I won't name names!

[kronovan]

Well the service still isn't up as of this morning. Not a good sign.

[Gratch]

Something interesting I just noticed.  Check out the actual URL:  http://www.gamespot.com/gamerankings/offline.html.

Maybe Gamestop decided they were tired of people having a one-stop-shop for reviews from other sites?

EDIT:  Hmmm.  Google brought up this.  Not sure who this guy is, but according to him GR isn't gone for good.

GameRankings is down for maintenance. It isn't going anywhere!

Due to the numerous times I have been asked I figured I should just blog on it so either people read it here or I can just send someone a link to it directly.

Over the past few months I have received a bunch of e-mails telling me GR has a virus or that GR set off a virus warning. Hell, someone even posted about it in the Tech Support forums and this is GS!
 
The thing I don't get is why are all my forum users and myself immune to this We have never received any warnings or a virus. At first I thought it was related to IE since 99% of us use Firefox but that can't be the case cause some are obstinate and still use the crappy IE

At any rate hopefully this maintenance will rid the site of this virus for good and those users/developers/publishers that are having problems when visiting GR will no longer have to deal with it.

UPDATE: GR will be down, at the very least, until Monday.

[Gratch]

Since it's now been down for 2 weeks, my guess is that Gamerankings is not coming back.   What a bummer.  Their "top rated" lists were extremely handy when picking up a new system.   It was also really useful to have not only all the reviews, but also all the preview articles in one easy to find place.

 

EDIT:  Scratch that, I guess it's back.  Really strange though.  If I type in gamerankings.com, I get the "sorry we're off-line message".  However, if I type in www.gamerankings.com, then it comes up just fine.  Odd..

[Knightshade Dragon]

Ehhhh, kinda.  Their script engine is still pretty broken.  I tried to toss my Tenchu Z preview up and the whole thing melted.

[kronovan]

Since it's now been down for 2 weeks, my guess is that Gamerankings is not coming back.   What a bummer.  Their "top rated" lists were extremely handy when picking up a new system.   It was also really useful to have not only all the reviews, but also all the preview articles in one easy to find place.

 

EDIT:  Scratch that, I guess it's back.  Really strange though.  If I type in gamerankings.com, I get the "sorry we're off-line message".  However, if I type in www.gamerankings.com, then it comes up just fine.  Odd..

I've also encountered some strange things while entering a URL to access the site. Sometimes when I enter gamerankings.com my session of IE attempts to access http://www.gamespot.com/gamerankings; WTF? .
It's great the sites back, but unfotunately the hyperlinks for some games don't currenlty work; I'm sure it will be ironed out in time.