Philatelic Foundation Certificate Search Down?

uboatnut, Randy Shoemaker is the founder/owner of PSAG who earlier founded/owned PSE before selling it to Collectors Universe (who sold it to the present ownership). Who is Randall Jacobs?
Revcollector, you said "If they no longer have a record of it then it is worthless.", which may or may not be true depending on viewpoint and could be misconstrued by someone reading it. When someone submits a stamp to PSE that has a previous PSE cert of which PSE is aware, the previous cert is flagged in their database as non-displayable, whether the submitter submitted the previous cert or not and whether the opinion was reversed or changed or not by the new certification. They have stated to me that they do this as a necessity to keep their grade population report correct as the population numbers come from the cert database data. So they count only displayable certs in their pop report, which helps ensure no overcounting of populations. So a person could have in their possession two clean PSE certs (the actual paper copies with the seal) of the same stamp, one say from 2011 and one from 2019, both showing exactly the same grade and condition, and both would be worthwhile certificates (not worthless) in my opinion in that they showed that the stamp had been examined twice, not once. However, only the 2019 cert in this example would be displayable in the PSE site cert database and the StampSmarter PSE cert database derived from it.
All: What Don says above about the PSE certs is absolutely correct, to the best of my knowledge. Don and Lorry deserve a lot of credit for bringing this resource to us; the ability to search for previous PSE certs by catalog number has been immensely helpful to me. Hopefully, the owners of PSE will in the future allow the StampSmarter searchable data to be extended back to the full extent of their database (1996).

It's also true that someone could take an old cert for a stamp that cannot be seen on the site any more and substitute the image for another example of the same stamp. They could then sell a slider as a quality stamp since no one would know. They could even print a copy of the faked cert and simply state that it was found in a large lot and this is the only copy they have. Since auction houses sell stamps with copies all the time it would almost certainly be accepted.

Indeed. And thanks! We should be happy that a once-empty glass is now half full before casting too many stones about the empty half.

I recently used the APS certificate archive successfully. Someone has written a cert number under a stamp but no cert in sight. It was a 1861 24c and the note didn't even say what Scott number it came up with. Fortunately the info came up on the APS website. These resources are valuable.

Rett:

My error. Randall Jacobs is another collector I know. Pulled the wrong last name from memory. Hate getting old.

uboatnut, no problem - happens to me from time to! time as well

It is down again.

Yep, afraid so.

The site itself is up and the early search still works for certs before 112,000. I don't know what the problem is for the other search site.

The rubber band broke....again. Should have it fixed within a month.

philatelicfoundation.org and pfsearch.org are two different domains, and likely on two different servers/hosts, so one being up or down doesn't necessarily impact the other.

EDIT:

pfsearch.org points to IP address 184.75.90.130
philatelicfoundation.org points to IP address 54.227.253.191

So they appear to be in completely different locations.

It's up now.

It seems to be down again.