Here Today... Gone To Hell!

Tomorrow, the one year anniversary (actually it should be in like May if you all remember correctly) of the last update on gnronline.com will commence. Will the wizards behind the Official GN'R site treat us to an update in celebration?

Or not?


A. Yes - updated with new look and actual news
B. Yes - updated by changing 3/9/2003 to 3/9/2004
C. No - A new site is on it's way
D. No - the site is a piece of shit anyway so why bother


I vote B. Yes - updated by changing 3/9/2003 to 3/9/2004 just because I think it would be funny  :hihi:

ISN'T THIS EXCITING?!
VOTE NOW!

Actually the last time the site was updated was 6/9/03,but whoever "updated" it made a typo and now it says 3/9/03. So wait 3 more months and then we'll have the one year anniversary celebration. :beer:

How about..

WHO GIVES A FUCK?!

it is lame, the lack of comunication that gnr has to his fans  :-\

I feel like shit... cuz the way that gnr cares about us.

I understand how you feel.  I'd like more frequent updates, but I don't think it's in the cards.
As far as gnronline goes, though, remember that Axl and company have no control over the content, updates, or anything else.  The site is owned and run by Interscope Records.
With respect to Axl himself, I guess he chooses to keep quiet for his own reasons.  I like to believe that he has conflict with the label and doesn't want to make any statements or promises that might be rendered invalid by Universal.
Who the hell knows?
/Mike

Yes B, your most important thing when u become a entertainer is to put your fans 1st. It just wrong to leave them in the dark

sad but true :-\

I could understand them not updating the site if nothing new had happened - but we have an upcoming show at Rio and a new album (albeit a GH)

Don't they want people to know?

What really scares me  :nervous: is the text of the update:


Stay Tuned
Stay Tuned for news and information on Chinese Democracy coming soon.

[posted 3/9/2003 U.S.A.]
 
Axl said that soon is not the word. How many years he meant?  ???

D

I'm going with Axl odds

Well the good news is that he said "Soon is not the word" a freakin' while ago. So maybe time is almost up.... :-\

yhea B!!
The people from the GNR  official site look very lazy.
hey anyone knows what hapened to Lost Rose??it was a great site!

WHY this GH shit have a site?! why not promote this in the GNR OFFICIAL SITE!?

well, fuck it.
nobody knows nothing.
the band don?t have a site anymore.
a 3 years boy could do a better site that this gnronline shit.
go to hell gnronline.
burn.
burn.
burn.

Well, right now it says "No news found". Does that qualify as an update?

Maybe their news database is just down   :confused:

Holy shit Batman. It did change. Maybe they'll put some thing up about the GH? haha   :P

gnronline has changed.

the 'stay tuned for news on chinese democracy coming soon' has been taken off gnronline.

this says it all people  :no:

gnr are dead

Wow - an update to the site.... however I think you are jumping to severe conclusions here.....  I think it's great that the site has changed... although I doubt it, how do you know the news isn't being posted soon.  If anything I doubt they would remove that line to announce or hint at the end of the band.  Someone has actually changed it - probably because it looked so bad to have it on there.  I welcome any update to that page - let's just hope we get a real one soon.  Nice observation though.

And I would also add that Chinese Democracy doesn't start now either!

Some of us are looking at the source code for the news page...some things look distinctly different.  There are some scripts there, that are mentioned, that we don't remember being there when we looked before (reviews.asp).  However, we're also debating if this is a good sign...or a bad sign.

The administrator over at  http://www.golala.com/forums/index.php?mforum=Gnrforum says there is a strong possibility that the official GNR webpage will be re-activated soon(a few weeks) with a countdown clock set for the countdown to RIO!!!

I think this is a great thing! 1 year to the day it changes...hmmm.
I'm trying to turn this into a positive situation...$hit maybe something will be announced soon? soon..I am getting sick of that word.
I predict things will happen 'soon' ;)

I know what you mean - I say this because that seemed to be the case some time ago, when something similar happened.  

In a short time whatever was on the site (I can't remember if it was this "coming soon" message already) returned as usual.

If Pilferk is right, it appears to be something different this time.

It could also be, FYI, that they have "news" set up to expire one year from posting.  In other words...nobody officially updated it.  It was background code that read the date on the update, and just deletes it from the page after a year.

Lets not read too much into this until we've got a bit more info.

Maybe, maybe not.  It could very well be that the page was "autogenerated" when the news database record expired.  The "new code" could just be a result of that autogeneration.

Unfortunately, Samspade.org, the tool we usually use to check when pages were last updated seems to be in a state of flux...so we're not able to tell exactly what has and hasn't happened.

Why to take 'stay tuned for news on chinese democracy coming soon' away. I guess there just isn't any news to share with us. Nothing isn't going to happen any time soon. That is what I can get out of that update.

Whether it was taken down because updated news is forthcoming, or it was done because the news was older than a year, it still looked incredibly embarassing to have
"Stay tuned for News on Chinese Democracy coming soon" with the 3/9/2003 date.
I don't read anything negative into it being removed.

After a bit of searching around, I managed to dig up another tool to check the HTML headers - similiar to what SamSpade did for us.  The tool is here: http://web-sniffer.net/

Unfortunately, the results aren't real promising - the page is still showing its last update as June 9, 2003 - lending credence to the theory that the removal of the 3/9/2003 date was nothing more than some sort of automated database cleaning process run by the DB itself.

I'm not saying that's the case - I'm just saying no one has actually physically updated the site - it was done by means of a script that existed as of 6/9/03

-darknemus

I would guess pilferk is right on the money.  The database still holds the news, and it's the latest news item for Gn'R, so either someone removed the code to query the db altogether, or the query limits the date ranges to a year or so.

First, little background.  Up until now, we (meaning the "detective crew) have always used SamSpade.org for our "web tool" needs.  It's no longer functional (or, rather, it's functionality has been greatly reduced).  Because of this, we couldn't verify an update to the page.  dark found another tool, just a bit ago, that does similar things.  It is here:

http://web-sniffer.net/

It says that gnronline.com was last updated in June of '03.  That pretty much assures that the "news" was just cleaned up by a script, and a new page was autogenerated.  In other words, no one has physically updated the page.

Oh, and maybe we should merge this thread with the other discussing the same topic?? Mods?

pilferk, you're probably right, but I don't know if you've ever worked with ASP code?  It's possible that they updated the SQL query or the ASP code without affecting the HTML structure or output, and so the changes wouldn't be picked up by web-sniffer or any other tracking software, or person.

I still think you're probably right, and the query just has a maximum date range, but we really have no idea what they could be doing behind the scenes.

Btw, I'd never heard of web-sniffer or tools like that.  Good to know, thanks!  : ok:

Loretian,

I agree with you there.  The only thing that I can bring up (and this is not knowing about ASP at all, really) - is that when the 3/9/03 update went up - the 'last updated on' HTML header info also changed.  That's where the 6/9/03 date came from.  So, not sure how that fits in - I'm just going from previous experience with the site.

-darknemus

We talked about that, too.  Given the update frequency for that site...I, at least, think that it's more likely the script was there, and it has some sort of hard coded "expiration" on new items.  Without being able to talk (or get a response) from the admin/webmaster, our best guess is that the page wasn't actually updated.  It's just acting on code that was in place.

That's a really good point.  Either the pages are dynamically generated and then statically saved (For speed reasons, probably), and the last updated date gets stuck on there when it happens, or they are actually making manual changes to the asp code and noting it there.  Of course, if the pages are dynamically generated, then statically saved, the expiration theory wouldn't work, because it'd be in the SQL query that checks it, which wouldn't be getting run each page generation.  But, the existance of the index2.html that seems to mirror the contents of index.html except with different page breaks also seems to indicate towards it being statically saved.

So, I would agree, most likely it's a date range limit in the SQL code for the news.asp page which is dynamically run each time, and the rest of the pages are dynamically generated and then statically saved.

Actually, I was just glancing through the code now, and I can't find any last updated information.  Am I just not seeing it, or is it gone now?

so is the page being updated or something is happening as we speak?

The last updated info is avaialble with HTML sniffer sites like web-sniffer.net

Try this link.

http://web-sniffer.net/?url=gnronline.com&submit=Submit&gzip=yes&type=GET  (might have to copy / paste)

-darknemus

Quick question...as I'm trying to decifer all this computer jargon. If I understand you guys correctly (dark, pil) you're saying that the site was designed to delete, change or alter itself automatically after a years time from the last update. Am I correct here?

Well, if that's the case, didn't the last "update" actually occur last June 9th and therefore any automated changes of this nature would not go into effect until 6/9/04?

Not sure any of this means anything, but it's cool nonetheless. What's cooler is that I started this thread a few days ago as a gag thread and I wake up this morning to find that there actually was a change...and it's my birthday too!

uh...I need a beer  ;)

Nope, it appears more likely that there's some sort of 'hook' into the database that basically, on 3/9/04 - erased the 3/9/03 (or hid from view) 'news' entry.

Basically, an automated database cleanup - Rosie the Robot for gnronline.com, essentially.

-darknemus

That's the one thing that makes us scratch our heads.  Like everything in GNR world, nothing is black and white.  Yes, the actual 'update' occured June 9 - however.. we have no way of knowing what date the DB was set at.  If I were to guess, the 3/9/03 thing was pulled from some date table, somewhere - basically, a mismatch of dates between PCs caused our discrepancy.

Heck, its even possible that the update was 'performed' on 3/9 - and for some reason not populated to the main site until June 9 - impossible to know without speaking to the webmasters / DB admins.

-darknemus

Ahh, gotcha, I see.  The HTTP headers are sending that information.  Thanks.  I blieve at some point the html files had last updated information in them as well, and some SQL snippets, but that all appears to be gone now.

Actually.... okay, I thought about it some more.  That last updated is just for the index.html page, which is the main frame holder.

That has nothing to do with the news.asp page (the page which actually displays the news).  That explains why I remember seeing the SQL snippets and other info in the news.asp code page after the June 9th date, and it's changed since then.  And, if I recall correctly, the SQL snippets did seem to have date range WHERE clauses in them, so that would support our theory of the news item just expiring.

Actually, I just tried web-sniffer on the news page (http://web-sniffer.net/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgnronline.com%2Fnews%2Findex.asp&gzip=yes&type=GET (http://web-sniffer.net/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgnronline.com%2Fnews%2Findex.asp&gzip=yes&type=GET)), and you'll see there's no last updated date.  That's because the server doesn't send last updated date info for ASP pages. (I think)

Good point.  We were actually looking at the source code of news.asp earlier.  We've looked before, and neither one of us remember the "reviews.asp" script reference either.

Maybe the news.asp script has been updated....

Ah yeah, I don't remember that either.  It looks like it's some sort of reviews for shows because of the parameters.  Interesting.

Ah well, I guess we'll just have to keep waiting to see what happens...

pilf and dark, thanks again for the info on the web-sniffer tool, that's incredibly useful.

Funny thing is, it actually WAS updated yesterday!!!

Did you people see it? It now says "No News Found" instead of that blurb about Chinese Democracy News Coming Soon. Also, the date it was updated was taken away.

Coincidence that yesterday was 3/9/2004? I think not. LOL.

It's coming!
AA.

Well, right, that's what we were talking about.  We were just theorizing as to whether it actually meant anything, and I think it's most likely that the news item just "expired", not that the date has any significance.

Oops, sorry. I didn't read through all the posts. My bad.

AA.

I can't believe the update is an update on how we STILL have no new news.  I take that back, I can believe it.  Instead of thinking the album is coming, I'm just going to say it's NOT coming out.  There, maybe I'll un-do the bad luck on the no news situation and say the opposite this time.

I think the site will updated before May.

When gnronline had 'stay tuned for new on CD coming soon' or whatever it said, you could not search for tour dates.

Now it says 'no news', yet it lets you search for tour dates.

 :confused:

 :rant:Who is fucking with us?

The red head uncle axl.

No, you've always been able to search the tour dates (at least as long as the Chinese Democracy news coming soon item has been there).  The only thing that's changed is that the news item is no longer listed.

We've already gone over why it most likely is just the news item expiring, and not any actual updates done by a person.

Check out the site from June 18th 2003, the tour search is there: http://web.archive.org/web/20030618034054/http://gnronline.com/ (http://web.archive.org/web/20030618034054/http://gnronline.com/)