This Board's Performance is Ass!

Couldn’t access the site at all last night, and it’s hit and miss tonight. At what point do they decide to give us a day’s credit on our membership?

What, is that 3.8 cents gonna help pay for your mom’s operation? Even if the site was down for a month straight, you’d be getting little over a buck (less for us charter members). I have a hard time believing the money involved is an issue for anyone here.

Particularly since each year at reup time - quite a few Dopers pay for the memberships of other Dopers (I’ve volunteered, and I believe I actually did one year - I know one year I wasn’t needed). If the $15 is really causing someone a hardship, Dopers will pitch in and get you covered.

I multitab and I multibrowse - as was pointed out, there are other sites on the internet I visit, and I visit some of them when this board is down or pokey. I honestly don’t get too many timeouts - I do see it when the board goes down for maintenance. However, I may not notice the timeouts being either very patient (hey, I was here in 2000! - We walked to school barefoot in the snow, uphill, both ways! Timeouts, you whippersnappers don’t know what a slow board is! Why, I’ll always remember the day we were slashdotted…) or very impatient (talking too long to load, visit another site, check my email, maybe work.)

I only mentioned it because of an “official” announcement a while back. It made a point of letting people know that accounts were being credited. I’m not hurtin’ for the $.038. I get way more than my money’s worth here.

This morning, I tried to offer some advice in GQ, and got a message saying there was an error, and an email had been dispatched to the Department of People Who Supposedly Give a Fuck. Ok-I’d saved the text-no biggie. Resubmit, and a message pops up claiming that the message I’m trying to post is a duplicate of the post the hampsters just ate within the last 5 minutes. Go away, you silly Englishman, or I will eat your message a second time-eh.

Lather, rinse, and repeat. I beefed to TubaDiva via email, and it’s not in her department. She was nice enough to reply to my email, though.

There’s nothing I can say which hasn’t been said by a hundred before me in sixty-two different ways. It just pisses me off that the quality was better when the place was free. If someone in TPTB came out and said, “We’ve taken your money and all of the ad revenue, and had a motherfucker of a week in Tahiti, and have no plans to do dick to the infrastructure”, that would be straightforward, and although I wouldn’t like it, could still respect the candor.

Instead, it’s supposed to be getting better. Um, no, it’s not.

[Average poster hat on]
Well, yes and no. I’ve been around for awhile. There were periods when it was free that sucked. The early days were sometimes painful. I literally, as others have said, walked away, took a shit, did the wash, and came back to find my post timed out. I tried it again, read snopes, read the news, came back, and got—nada!
[Average poster hat OFF]

Well, the Tahiti modfest WAS a blast. But mostly we need more money for blow. And hookers. And… :slight_smile:

While I sympathize with you, believe me I do, TPTB, of which I am NOT one, aren’t sitting on their asses. They have little incentive to blow the posters here off.

Boy, did I read this sentence wrong!

Average poster or not, am I wrong to believe you still have access to “the secret forum”? Y’know, the one where all the moderators go to make fun of us puny peons. Can you indulge us with the tone of discussion (if any) that is going on there right now?

I said before, I hate the chronic chorus of bitching about how the board is run, but recently things have seemed pretty bad as far as time-outs go. And you’re right to remind us that this board used to suffer from several time-outs in the past. I guess it’s just been that things before a month ago were going so well, we sort of got spoiled into forgetting about such times.

Nope I have access to most places around here. But, you’re wrong to assume we have some sekrit forum where we make fun of posters. We do that in Mod email. And, to satisfy your curiosity, ALL mods/Admins are in unison hoping that this issue gets solved quickly and to the satisfaction of posters. Why would we wish otherwise?

The board sucks ass big time lately. I’m affected by it the same as you. I can’t do my job. We hope that it gets solved.

Either one of, or both of our sarcasm detectors are not working. Because I was just trying to be silly. Oh, and I see Jerry has an announcement on top of every forum page. I must have missed that earlier.

(ETA, someone did mention it already, I’ll leave my quote up though in case the board times out for a member before clicking on the link. :wink: )

Your reply is appreciated, Sir. Also afforded a good laugh about the situmacation.

It was out for me for at least three hours yesterday, the front page was down too. I get timeouts on a regular basis, sometimes even during times that you would think are light demand times, like 02:00~03:00 in Chicago’s time zone (i.e. right about now for me.) It did get better for a while after the new server was put in, but it seems to have gotten a lot worse than any other times I can remember in the recent past.

I think one of the things that bothers most of us is that we aren’t getting much in the way of feedback. People get a lot less anxious about things if they understand what the problem is, and the administrators aren’t all that forthcoming with information. That’s basic conflict-resolution/customer service tactics. I have no idea why they seem to want to keep everything secret.

Some of us (not me) probably even have the technical knowledge to make some recommendations about how to fix the problems…if they knew what the specs were for this system. I’m not going to bitch and moan and make demands, but really, the SDMB administration are not handling this well from either a technical or communication point of view.

Because you’re all a bunch of masochists who love to answer the same damn question over and over again?

Oh, it was a rhetorical question. Nevermind.

You’re not suggesting there isn’t a problem, though, right?

I appreciate your candor. The administrative staff probably doesn’t, though.

Either that, or’s a strategic way of getting people to shut up about the problems – admit it with promises of improvement. It weakens the venom of just about any complainer, regardless of the situation, doesn’t it?

To be fair, Dudley, samclem said “hope”, not “promise”.

True. I was speaking more in the general sense of quieting the bitching masses.

No, it wasn’t.
March, 2003.
Why is this message board so agonizingly slow?

April, 2002.
Why is this site so slow sometimes?

August, 2001.
Thanks for correcting the performance problems.

Uh huh.

And…

June, 2000.
The site needs more bandwidth

Uh huh.

And the “how come this site is so slow/why can’t we pay for better service?” discussion in this thread was certainly not the first time it had come up.

Although Dudley’s language was more colorful than mine will be and he has responded similarly since this post, I’d just like to add:

I think he was referring to the fact that those who hadn’t experienced (repeated) timeouts thought those who had were telling the truth, but because they hadn’t experienced those (or that they have a life, etc.), what’s the big deal?

(woodstockbirdybird, I missed the edit window (no, miraculously, not because of a timeout)

Although Dudley’s language was more colorful than mine will be and he has responded similarly since this post, I’d just like to add:

I think he was referring to the fact that those who hadn’t experienced (repeated) timeouts thought those who had were telling the truth, but because they hadn’t experienced those timeouts (or that they have a life, etc.), what’s the big deal? I never understand in these complaint threads how one’s non-experience of some event diminishes the validity of my mentioning/complaining about my experiencing that event.