I am just picturing Jerry sitting in his cube with a backlog of work for the next 6 months.
His primary job is probably to run the servers that run the newspaper and SDMB is probably a small part of his job.
Do you see why he might be a little less than customer friendly? Hell, the last people you normally want talking to customers are an IT person.
Jim (a Programmer & Network support IT guy)
Thanks for the answers. I didn’t realize that information such as page hits or bandwidth, which were alluded to in a general fashion earlier in the thread by TubaDiva, were considered sensitive or secret information, partially because I’m a member of a few other message boards (none so high-traffic… er, I don’t think so, anyway, I guess it’s hard to be sure) that have openly shared such information. A simple “sorry, we don’t give out that information” early in the thread when the info was first requested would have been enough for me.
The only other thing I have to say, or will say, about this is that it’s very frustrating and a little upsetting to ask seemingly simple questions about a paid service I subscribe to (granted, the subscription fee is small, but it’s still a fee) and basically be yelled at and condescended to (Jerry’s sarcastic question about which project we think he should work on, as though we’re all privy to the details of his workday and project load) for even daring to ask.
I’ll still re-up when the time comes, because I feel the SDMB is still worth it, but this kind of thing is really disappointing.
I appreciete all this, but would it be too much to ask for the many happily paying customers you have to maybe put out some sort of “State of the SDMB” notice once a year? I mean, I trust you guys and all, but saying that there may or may not be some sort of changes sometime in the spring is a bit more vague than I’d prefer as a paying customer (but not so vague that I’m not willing to deal with it).
Also, I have to ask TubaDiva, since I haven’t really been as active as I used to be for a few years now, how she has adapted to the increased everything-related-to-the-SDMB aspect of her life during that time. Back in 2001, she seemed an almost goddess-like figure, capable of dealing with our tantrums and other assorted drama with more aplomb than should ordinarily be expected of a human. I can’t imagine what it’s like for her these days.
Ever heard of big boards? The SDMB is a big forum but there are forums out there that dwarf it substantially.
The SDMB is not in the top 25 when it comes to total number of posts, or members (in fact it isn’t even close.)
If the statistics on 10m page views per month is correct then the SDMB just barely cracks the top ten, the biggest forum listed by Big-Boards is at around 45m page views a month.
If you’re interested the number one is Nexopia which is a primarily Canadian site focused on what appears to be dating life. While there are subscriptions available for extra features, you don’t need a subscription to post and the site seems to be supplemented by advertising.
Seem to be having trouble again this week . . . The Board taking forever to post a reply, or to switch from thread to forum directory, etc. . . . Sometimes even getting “Cannot Find Server” . . . And last week too. But not the week before that. Why is it, that these problems seem to come and go?
At the risk of being redundant, here’s my take on it from another thread, “Why is the board so slow?”, with slight variation.
Your question has many potential answers, any or all of which may apply to a situation.
Generally speaking you are at the mercy of internet traffic; if there’s slowdowns or bottlenecks between your computer and our server, that will be reflected in your wait time. Please see the Internet Traffic Report for more details on how this happens.
Internet Traffic Report
>http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm
The resources available to this board are finite. It does seem sometimes (especially at peak times, when everybody and his brother are calling for pages), it seems those resources are stretched beyond limits. This means that at peak times the board reacts to overdemand by thrashing around and resetting. The outcome from this is that some requests for pages go through lickety-split (on the good side of the reset, when there’s a lot of bandwidth available), some go through very slowly (at various points in the process, usually getting slower as the demand builds), and some don’t go through at all (got dropped by the server while it was resetting).
There’s no way of predicting which of those scenarios will happen to you; it’s the luck of the draw.
It can also be a local problem; what browser are you using? Some are more effective than others. I suspect most of our users these days swear by Opera or Firefox rather than IE or the other less-powered browsers, like the one built into AOL, which, to give the technical term, sucks scissors. Taking care to clear out your temp caches may also improve your experience.
The board is huge – too large, really – and we are looking at ways to offload our archives so that they are accessible but not part of the everyday database. That should speed things up nicely. We’re also looking at ways to improve the server. All this is in process, and it’s happening slowly, but it is happening. All we can ask you to do in the meantime is be patient and bear with us.
TubaDiva
Well it’s certainly been incredibly slow recently here. As for actually posting a response - I’d estimate that about 60% of mine have “timed out” over the past few weeks. I’m not surprised there’s been an increase in the number of double posts recently.