Is there no one in this organization willing to just tell the teeming millions when this ‘maintenance/upgrade’ will be complete by?
It is extremely frustrating to deal with everything about the board going hinky. But it’s infuriating to not just be given the straight dope!
It’s not like we’re not glad that this upgrade is occurring, were overjoyed. But when you have paying customers complaining everyday, about some new twist on poor board performance, why wouldn’t you just be honest and tell people, “This will take two weeks to complete, if you’re very frustrated come back then!”
What a funny way to run a business! Almost as strange as the pretending you have no idea how long it could take, or when it’s scheduled to be done by! Are we supposed to actually believe that?
Just give it to us straight! Is that really too much to ask?
They don’t give an exact date because they don’t know.
With stuff like this, sometimes it’s on the very next thing to do on the list. Then something else happens and the techs have to put this issue on the back burner because the other thing takes priority.
Since I don’t believe any maintenance has been agreed to or (presumably) approved, there’s not much to talk about. The folks here on the message board don’t make the decisions or control the work.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the board is broken beyond the owner’s means or desires to repair, and these are the last death throes before it finally kicks it for good.
That is my great fear, and colors my perceptions of most other complaints here in ATMB by making me see them as “petty whining that makes me want to go all Correctional on someone”.
Perhaps I’m just more optimistic, but I don’t think that Sun-Times would just let go a site reaching fourteen million pageviews per month. Based on my experience at work, it’s just that organizing and scheduling something like this server upgrade takes a while.
Please get a grip. We’re very sorry about the trouble and we hope it’ll be resolved soon and we will keep you posted as best we can, but there’s nothing else to report for now.
It’s threads like this which show us how much harm to society Star Trek has done.
After all those years of Captain Kirk calling Scotty for status updates on when the engines, or the warp capicator or whatever other technobabble needs to be substituted and Scotty saying, “I’ll have it done in an hour”(I refuse to spell in pigeon Scottish) and then Kirk barks “I need it done in ten minutes!”.
Of course, in real like, repairs and maintenance don’t work on timetables like that.
Curse you Gene Roddenberry, Curse you!
One thing I am noticing that’s strange is on the main forum page, you’ll see in each forum what’s supposed to be the most recently replied to thread listed across from the forum name. But when you go to that individual forum, that thread is not listed at the top. In some cases I’ve had to scroll way down to find it. The other thing I’m seeing is that post/reply counts on the main forum page don’t match the actual number of replies in a thread anymore either.
I assume this is all part of whatever maintenance we are doing?
It’s not part of the maintenance. It’s one of the problems everyone’s bitching about and a reason maintenance is needed. I have to refresh nearly every time I open a new page, sometimes more than once. At least I haven’t been logged out at random times, yet.
He may have a grip. SDMB has been taken over by a new major corporate owner within recent memory. We don’t know what interest or commitment that new owner may have to continue running this board. We do know, from the mods and admins over the years, that this board is not a major money-making operation. It’s commonly been noted that paid membership and advertisements just barely cover operating costs.
So, assume at least that the board is not losing money. But that’s not necessarily good enough. What is the opportunity cost of maintaining this board? That is, how much more revenue could the owners pull in if they put the same resources to other uses? What does it cost to run this board? Server hardware, electric costs, maintenance costs, paid staff costs, storage costs, internet connectivity costs, hamster feed, . . . ? Could the owners put those same costs and resources to a more profitable use? It is good business for the owners to continue this board?
Several posts in ATMB over the past few weeks have hinted at this. AFAIK, I’m the first one to post this question explicitly, and maybe it’s something that you don’t want to talk about. But I think I’m not the only one starting to worry?
Should we go to a paid-member-only model, as this board once was?
Yeah, I’m fully gripped. Not sure why the condescending reply was called for, but whatever.
We’re talking about the Sun-Times, a company who’s newspaper recently laid off 100% of their photographers. I don’t think anybody here can assume anything about what they would do w/ this board.
Especially since it’s not outside the realm of possibilities that the only notification we’ll get that the board is going away is when we try to hit the site and it doesn’t respond.
