They’ve extended paid subscriptions by a day a few times in the past, after short periods of downtime. I would certainly hope there would be some similar compensation this time, also.
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I don’t know what any of you are talking about. I haven’t experienced any blips. The Dope’s been rock-solid for me. :shrug:
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And some of us just ain’t offering due to the possible ownership (ergo, liability) of a complete disaster of a database driven by shitty code.
I imagine the years of band-aiding and skin-deep administration have things in such a manner that it probably makes sense to start from scratch, and leaving the current database as only a searchable archive.
But, is that not the Pit’s purpose?
I think that the comments excerpted above succinctly state the problem. Previously patient subscribers are increasing frustrated with the service (or lack thereof) provided by the SDMB. Add me to the list. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t stated any opinions about board performance in the past, unless it was in a humorous vein. Clearly that was a mistake if it led anyone to think that it was something that would be tolerated indefinitely.
I thought the same thing, but recent posts lead me to believe that this is still in the planning stages. Which implies that the outages and glacial speed are from the chewing gum and baling wire fixes to the existing system.
We have server upgrades all the time at work. To avoid disrupting the users, they are always scheduled in advance, announced to users, and take place at night or on the weekends unless it is an emergency fix. So now I’m curious if recent outages were due to serious problems with the existing board, or just a lack of courtesy for paying customers.
I’m not sure that the Boards are any less active at night or during the weekend. Some of us post from home, you know.
I suppose the closest thing to “downtime” would be about 1AM US EST ~ 6AM GMT, but who’s going to perform the work at that time?
A classic. Hillarious!
Oh, it’s *much *slower in the wee hours of the morn’.
yawn Ask me how I know. Gorram insomnia.
We’re going to have our memberships extended for the length of time that Search is down, right? Since that’s half the benefit to being a member, maybe they’ll extend for half the length of time the function is disabled.
Either that or we’ll get some half-assed excuse about spambots and how we peons could never understand the size and complexity of the near-sentient SDMB.
How many things on this list can I do regularly and without frustration?
I can post whenever the board isn’t fucked up.
The title under my name does indeed say “Member”, whenever the board isn’t fucked up
I do have a post count… When the board isn’t fucked up
I can’t search the massive SDMB message database, because that’s what fucks up the board
View member profiles, when the board isn’t… well, you know.
Ruin my ignorant bliss will you? <shakes fist>
The board has been bad lately, but it happens from time to time and then it stops. From time to time the power goes out in my house too. It’s frustrating, but I don’t call Com Ed and tell them to fuck off and I’m not going to do that for the Dope either.
Matter of fact I just reupped my subscription right this very minute.
The Bad Astronomy/Universe Today boards just underwent a server migration. Here’s how they did it: About a week before the migration was to take place, there was a nice sticky and a couple of TPTB threads announcing the date and time at which the migration would take place, these also detailed approximately how long it was thought that it would take. At said date and time, if you hit the boards you got a message box similar to the following:
Now, it actually took longer than was originally estimated to complete the move (by several hours), but the folks at BAUT did change their outage message to reflect that the transition took longer than anticipated. There was much happiness by the hordes who visit that board by how the move was handled.
IIRC we did that once already. December 2002? The “Winter of our missed content”? Maybe it was 2004…
Of course, I can’t search ATMB for it… :rolleyes:
Anyway, at some point IIRC we did render “all the old stuff” into “Archives Only”, which was supposed to speed up operations, which IIRC explains why you can’t bring up threads older than a certain year, because they were, um, lost in the transition.
It’s all very hazy, sorry, as I am not a tech geek. No doubt someone who remembers it better will be along in a minute…
I’m not one to usually join the bitching in these threads, but jeeeeze!
You know, if you’re a person who “hasn’t complained about this before, but…” all that means is that you’re a couple of years late to the party.
If I didn’t enjoy the posts here, I wouldn’t still be ponying up my $7.50/year. However, my ability to enjoy the posts remains set in direct proportion with my ability to VIEW the posts.
I have not seen a BBS, professional OR unprofessional, run with as little apparent technical skill and performance integrity as this one, EVER. NO other site has gone down with more frequency and enthusiasm than a preacher’s daughter. NO other site has so consistently DISCOURAGED me from posting by timing out with depressing regularity after I hit the “post” button.
“If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.” Well, like I said before, I DO like it - when it WORKS. And since the timing on this is less reliable than the Pony Express during hurricane season…
Well, at least we’re getting into about the problem this time. Superficially, anyway.
I love this place. I had no problem going to the pay system, because I didn’t want to lose the boards, and I figured $15 was a small price to pay for my fun. But now we’re paying, and they’ve got ads up all over, and we keep having issues… Do they want our money? If they don’t straighten this mess out and start treating their paying customers with a little bit of respect, I know we’re going to lose a whole bunch of very interesting and valuable members, which will definitely dilute the quality of the SDMB.
Keep us informed.
Offer us something to compensate for our lost privileges.
Apologize for the inconveniences and the generally crappy way this stuff keeps getting handled.
That would be a start.
There really aren’t any excuses for this nonsense. Someone said it’s tough to find someone who is an expert on hardware, software, and databases. No, it’s really not. Not for this kind of application. Someone on my messageboard took over running one of those mommy messageboards and I ran her through the basics (updating the software, backups, optimizing the database) over the course of a couple nights. Her experience before that was pretty much limited to posting on messageboards. I think she’s a bank teller during the day, but she figured it out and the site ran fine. She kept up with updates better than me, actually. Whenever a new version of vBulletin was released, she made a copy of the site, upgraded the copy, made sure everything worked fine, then swapped the copy with the old version to make it live. Piece of cake.
Sure, sometimes disaster strikes and you need someone who really knows what he/she is doing to swoop in. But with a managed server this can all be taken care of for you.
Someone mentioned shitty code. If the code here is shitty, it’s not vBulletin’s fault. Maybe I’m a fanboy because I’ve been on vBulletin for my own site for seven years now, but it’s the best in the business in my opinion. There are plenty of alternatives out there, but none of them measure up to the features and stability of vBulletin, which is probably why vBulletin vastly outnumbers every other solution combined on sites like big-boards.com.
The rightest thing that Liberal has ever said is in this thead. There’s no use making suggestions. They either don’t know how to implement them, or don’t care. Myself and other vBulletin-wise dopers have posted an endless series of suggestions over the years, and they’re almost universally ignored (I actually got one through once, it was my proudest moment).
And so we sit, waiting for something to change for the better but assuming it’ll probably never happen. It’s a shame too. Despite the administration, this is still a great messageboard. It’s only a matter of time before the users that make it great decide it’s not worth the trouble though.
I appreciate that the admins and J Davis are not to blame for the situation. And I, like y’all, are full up with requests for us to be patient and understanding, half assurances and, ‘gosh darn we’re doing our best under difficult circumstances’. Full up. Don’t want to hear it again, don’t believe it anymore.
It’s pretty clear that while we have only these minions to complain to there is no longer any hope or faith left in the community that they can, or will, actually create change.
I think it’s time to escalate, quite honestly. Should we look to the mods and amins to hook us up to the higher ups that might actually have the power to address our issues? I don’t think so. I don’t think they would do so, even if they could.
I think it’s time we start sending our complaints directly to our Creative Loafing overlords. Do I care if it reaches the exact right individual there? Not really. Let’s stop applying for answers to people who don’t possess them and aim a little higher.
Who knows, if every person who posted in this, or the other, thread sent off a polite but pointed missive to Creative Loafing perhaps someone (actually in the loop) will deign to stop by and give us the, y’know, I hate to say it, Straight Dope on the situation.
I have made my last appeal, to have my concerns heard, to the amins and mods. You’ve been given opportunities, too numerous to mention, to provide solid concrete answers, and failed repeatedly. You have relied on our patience and understanding for too long, gone to that well one too many times. We have lost faith with you and you have only yourselves to blame.
I encourage other dopers, who feel as I do, to do as I am about to do - take my complaint to someone higher up the food chain. Perhaps they will fall on the same deaf ears. Perhaps they don’t want to hear it. I really don’t care. I’ve been a loyal member a long time. I have paid up each year and think I deserve to be heard whether it produces results or not.
I’ve recently installed Ubuntu Linux, and I’ve wandered over to their boards a couple of times. They’re running vBulletin, same as here, only the latest version. Here are the stats:
Threads: 708,751, Posts: 4,527,132, Members: 530,483
Now, over there, you can search even if you haven’t registered (which, as it happens, costs absolutely zip). And, get this, you only need to wait 15 seconds between searches. So, if you factor in the number of registered users, plus thousands upon thousands of guests (there must be a load of Ubuntu noobs using the search function to find solutions to their problems) and the 15 second interval, that database must be getting slammed like Paris Hilton. But it fucking works. It never took more than a couple of seconds for my search results to appear (some queries returned 15 pages’ worth).
So, let’s contrast that with the SDMB, shall we?
Threads: 368,229, Posts: 8,134,684, Members: 74,797
Granted, there are more overall posts in the database (although fewer total threads), but the key factor is that there’s only a fraction of the members capable of searching compared to the above forum. When you consider only paid members can search, and that many of the 75,000 members are inactive, the actual workload for the database is pretty small. At least, not big enough to justify limits of two fucking minutes.
Now, I can’t speculate on what kind of budget the Ubuntu team have for running their boards, but that isn’t particularly pertinent when you realise that there are boards all over the net of a similar size to this one that either allow guests to search, or registered (for free) members to search at reasonable intervals.
Everything here seems to take so much more time and effort, and things that are bog standard elsewhere are seen as luxuries. It’s like the message board equivalent of Animal Farm, except the peons are paying money instead of working in the fields. Private messages? Rejoice, for the years of toil have proved fruitful. Let us thank the dear leaders for overseeing this harvest. Now, we can get that server uptime if we just pull together for the harsh winter ahead. One more year.
I would love to. Who do I contact?
Just to clarify, we mods have no more information than posters when it comes to server issues and the technical administration of the board. Moreover, we’ve been asked not to comment in threads like these, so as not to muddy the waters with opinions that would appear to most readers as official statements on behalf of the administration. Unfortunately, because the people who do have the answers tend not to be very active posters, when you guys ask reasonable questions, you often get silence in return, which is understandably very frustrating. I’m not sure what the solution to this is.
For what it’s worth, I agree with this 100%.