Funpic

» see funpic.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The name was literal at first. On the oldest capture of funpic.de, from 29 January 2003, the site is "Die Fun-Community im Internet" and its one product is "Die hammerharte Picture-Gallerie": 950 joke pictures in 15 categories, served by an off-the-shelf gallery script, with eight users online.

Free hosting was added at the end of that year. By 2005 the front page read "Kostenloses Webhosting" over a short list that began "PHP inklusive" and "MySQL inklusive". Most free hosts of those years gave out static pages behind a banner, so a free database was the whole draw.

It worked. The front page carried a member counter, and it showed 996,414 on 17 October 2008 and 1,225,945 on 21 April 2009. Sites lived on subdomains of funpic.de, and the last version of the offer was 5,000 MB with PHP 5 and traffic included. Everything about the place was in German, from the control panel to the forum, and I never had an account there.

Funpic was never closed by anyone. In the Wayback Machine's crawl of its user sites the errors pile up from 17 May 2014, and the last page that loaded correctly was captured on 4 June. On 10 June a user on the Computerhilfen forum wrote that his webspace had been unreachable for several weeks and that no statement could be found. The domain does not resolve today.

~ the case file ~

~ from Dresden to Coburg ~

The company behind it came later than the service. Funpic.de AG was founded in Dresden in 2007 with 50,000 euros of capital. Its founders and first directors were Andreas Bergler and Alexander Liemen, and until 2009 its profits were passed up to a holding company under a formal transfer agreement.

In 2010 the AG moved to Coburg. The founders left at the same time, and Harald Ettel and Timo Rolle took over the board. A January 2014 post on the blog kilohack.net, quoted in the comments of funpic-offline.de, said that United Colo GmbH, a Coburg data center company, had taken over all of the shares in that same year. Rolle was a director of both firms. The documentation site funpic-offline.de records something else from 2010: an "Aufstand" and a "Streik" by the forum moderators over constant server problems. The moderators ended up telling users on Funpic's own forum to register with other hosts.

~ three petitions ~

The trade site Homepage-Webhilfe laid out the last spring on 23 June 2014. The first insolvency petition against United Colo was filed on 15 April and the third and last on 5 June, with the final hearing on 12 June. Ettel left the Funpic board on 10 April and Rolle on 22 April. The documentation site drew the conclusion on 11 June: "Damit ist die Funpic.de AG scheinbar aktuell ohne Geschäftsführung." The company appeared to have no management at all.

On 11 June the author of funpic-offline.de scanned the 856 IP addresses registered to Funpic and got an answer from four. The company's Facebook page was deleted the same day, after users had filled it with complaints. United Colo's business was carried on by a successor firm, United GameServer GmbH, and the two free hosts, Funpic and its sister brand OHost, were left out. Homepage-Webhilfe summed it up for the customers: "Die Webseite ist offline und die Daten sind alle weg."

~ the comment thread ~

People kept finding the documentation site for months. One wrote on 29 July 2014: "ich hätte gern nur noch einmal kurz zugriff, damit ich meine daten lokal abspeichern kann". Just one more short login, to save the files. In December another asked whether the data had at least been deleted. The site's author answered in one line: "Das weiß keiner ausser Funpic selbst." Nobody knows except Funpic itself.

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