I got the prompt to update the GMR desktop client and the update went smoothly.

Great news: GMR is up!

EDIT: I guess everyone is trying to reach the site at the same time, it is really slow and I am seeing messages like "waiting for available socket" when waiting for the page to load.

It is not that important, but apparently all the messages and comments from the last 2 months are also lost :(

Any idea when GMR will be up again?

You won't have to restart your games, you can find your previously uploaded save files (if uploaded by the GMR desktop client) in Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Saves\hotseat\GMR Archive.

Of course I am sure there will be cases where all players in a game used the website (Mac users can't use GMR desktop client) to upload save files, and do not have any manually backed up save files, or used desktop client but then went ahead and deleted everything in the GMR archive folder or unchecked the archive option in the GRM desktop client settings. I hope these will be only a small number of games.

EDIT: Of course any games that are created after the "restore point" GMR admins use, will have to be re-created first, then save files from archives can be uploaded to be able to continue from where the game was. In addition, GMR admins mentioned on facebook that they are looking into a possible way to use save files to create a game, so that the games that are in this category may not have to be re-created by players manually.

We will have problems more serious than skipped turns (we will be able to upload save games from archive folder, so it is not a catastrophe):

https://www.facebook.com/MultiplayerRobot
As many of you have noticed GMR is completely down! Our web server has experienced a rare double-disk failure and we'll need to rebuild everything from scratch. We do have off-site backups of the database and save files that we'll be restoring, unfortunately they're almost two months old. We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and how much this will set your games back!

We're working hard getting everything back up and hope to have things restored by tonight or tomorrow. Thank you all for your patience!

The site has been down for the last 9 hours or so. GMR Client is also not able to contact GMR server (not surprisingly).

Any ETA on when we can use GMR again?

Thanks

New needs create new suggestions:

1) (this one was suggested before by Xaviien, but the need arose under a different circumstance) We need "deputy host" or a way to change the host. In one of my games, I asked for a turn timer extension while I was out of town, I didn't pay attention but it turns out the host was on vacation mode, so there was no way to modify the turn timer. As a result I made other players wait while I was being skipped and eventually removed from the game due to reaching skip limit.

2) We need a more advanced way to select which slot to fill when joining a game. Currently, when you join a game, you are asked which Civ to play, which is fine if all slots are assigned to different civs. However, in the above mentioned game that I am removed, all slots are Shoshone and there are 3 empty slots right now. When I join, I am assigned to one of the 3 slots that will play first among them, but I think my original slot was a different one. A related suggestion is a way to determine which slot was yours, now all I can do is look at recent turns, see who was playing before and after me and try to determine my old slot (not easy in some games).

In the details page, in the Turn Timer box, there is an edit button with pencil icon, click that.
Then, this box turns in to a Modify Turn Timer box.
At the bottom of that box, there is a setting for "Kick a player after being skipped", you can type that player's skipped turn count there. Next time it is his turn, he will be kicked (at the end of turn timer I guess)

+1 to Xaviien's Deputy host suggestion
+1 to Atlan's rating system suggestion

Couple of more from me:

1) When invited to a game, the invitation is listed in your notifications and when you click on the invitation, you are taken to the "joining" page. You can not see the "Details" "Comment" "Recent Turns", but you might want to get some more info about the game before joining, so I suggest a way to see those when getting an invite. What I do as a workaround is: click the invitation learn the game's ID (5 digit number at the end of url) then open a new browser tab and then type http://multiplayerrobot.com/Game# followed by the game's ID.

2) I suggest some additional means to check for a player's activity and reliability levels. Currently you can see the total number of turns he played, total number of games he is currently in, total points he gained in GMR, total number of turns he skipped and vacationed. All these are useful info but they do not have a time component (except knowing that this is cumulative since that player joined GMR). Of course you can check the player's recent turns to see how many turns he played, skipped and vacationed recently. However, if there was a way to see this data for the last week and/or month, it would be an easier way to assess if that players is active / reliable.

Banthesun,

Check the file size, how big it is? In my experience, the games with smaller maps with fewer players have save files that are between 0.5 MB and 1 MB, for the games with larger maps with many players, I have seen save files up to almost 2 MB. If your save files are larger, they might be bloated.

Info regarding how to fix the bloated save file and how to prevent from happening can be found at the below link:

fix for the Bloated save file