Well, since you’ve asked so nicely, maybe I will.
Nah.
Time outs happen. I feel very sad for you that something this minor is driving you insane with rage.
Obviously (or we’re obviously meant to believe), our $14.95 doesn’t buy any of us 600-pound gorilla status, and our collective $14.95’s aren’t adequate funding to invest in a technical solution, so I won’t argue from that perspective.
And I won’t cry about how much heart and soul I put into contributing to the board, because when I’ve typed out something and then seen it promptly eaten, I’ve come to see this as my guardian angel telling me not to be such an attention whore, and to stop getting into pissing matches with strangers on the internet. I’ve been here enough years to understand that this board is a nice amusement, but not in the top ten, or even top fifty things worthwhile in life. Another thing I’ve come to understand over those years is that the great majority of us here truly are essentially strangers and we always will be.
God help me if I think my posts are somehow special. I know that if I don’t buzz in with “nitpick: that was the Venerable Bede, not Chaucer.” Someone else will or already has. And there’s even a good chance that my idea for a new thread will be replicated by someone else eventually. I’m just one out of the thousands of those Shakespeare-surrogate monkeys typing away.
But I do feel bad about the super-posters, who invest the same time bringing in the fruits of years of scholarship and experience, and a level of intelligence that allows them to type long but never long-winded posts, giving of the same amount of their more valuable time to dispel ignorance (while I need this same amount of time to go back over my posts and retype “their” and “becasue.” correctly.)
You know who I’m referring to, and if this class of poster starts to vote with his or her feet, this place gets left to us: the angry, stupid and crazy. Not a pretty picture.
Just adding my name to the chorus. I read the boards pretty much every day and for the last few weeks I can’t remember a day when I didn’t have at least one timeout.
You have a wonderful perspective. I wish I could absorb a fraction of it from you.
I do love this place, and while I’m a bit annoyed when it goes down, there’s one thing I’m thankful for when it does: I don’t have to read about how anyone who’s bothered by extremely poor service must be mentally ill or a sad loser who lives in his parents’ basement. I get a break from the Moron Brigade.
As long as we seem to be collecting data points here, I will report that I was unable to get into both boards and home page between about 10 and 11 p.m. last night, CDST, at which time I went to bed. Which tallies with Garfield’s experience, as he’s in the same time zone that I am.
My assumption, since the home page was unavailable, too, was that Jerry had taken it all down in order to administer secret hormones to the hamsters.
When the site was inaccessible yesterday evening, I did a tracert to see whether it was the server or some router in between that was the issue. To my surprise, I was able to reach straightdope.com easily that way, but the time-outs were persistent when trying to access it through a browser. I don’t know enough to guess what went on there, but it appears to be a software issue and not hardware.
It might help if we could know the architecture of the system. Are the pages simple HTML? Is there VBScript behind them? ASP.net? JavaScript?
What’s on the backend? SQL?
Is there a mirror database?
I’m pretty sure they’re running Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It could be a bit tricky if these are on a Windows server, though. Windows wants you to use IIS, SQL Server, and VB Script. (Although it does process Javascript reasonably well.)
I don’t have any problems with any other message board in terms of timeouts, and mostly I visit free message boards. Well, entirely, except for the Dope. Their performance far outshines the Dopes. Non message board websites far outshine the Dope as well.
In fac,t I would say that if the rest of the Internet were as unreliable as the Dope, it would be considered a major problem and would severely hinder the economic development of the Internet.
Angry? ANGRY??? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU CALLING ANGRY!!!
Am I being whooshed? The front end is in PHP; the back end is MySQL.
It sucks!
I predict that this thread is about to blow up.
…As though more evidence was needed, I present the last few hours as proof.
Yes, and our evil counterparts all have beards.
“The operation timed out while waiting for boards.straightdope.com.”
Take at least 3 times daily. May cause irritability. Do not operate heavy machinery, nor ask for your $14.95 back.
Any explanation for the latest blackout? (Approximately 11 am to 2:30 pm, Eastern Daylight Time.)
Yeah, it’s probably just me.
No whooshy. I could have figjured out it was PHP had I, you know, looked at the URL. How would I know it’s MySQL?
I was unable to get on from the time I got home from work (about midnight) to when I went to bed (after 3AM).