Re: Forum Outages
 

I hope that means you will apologize for calling Shrapnel "dishonest." What you appear to have meant is that you thought the message was "unprofessional." I still may not agree (it WAS a pretty short time) but I can at least see where such a sentiment would be coming from.

-Max

Re: Forum Outages
 

NO

If my mechanic kept telling me to "Check back soon" and he wasn't finished until 14 hours later I would also call him dishonest the same as ShrapnelGames.

Patience is a virtue.
 

What if your car was totaled though? And the mechanic was offering to rebuild it from the ground up, for free? Then how long would "soon" be? It's my understanding that the forum is either going to be soon, or is in the process of, being completely remade under new programming/code, from the ground up. That may be what's happening now. I got this from Mindi, by the way, so the information itself should be nice and accurate, even if my own understanding and ability to communicate said, is less than complete.

I've been online for longer than I'm willing to admit (my first internet experience happened at 2400 baud, so you do the math), and I don't stress about anything that takes less than 1 to 3 months to get done. That's "soon" to me. And as much as I post on here, I have lots and lots of other things in my life to occupy me.

Re: Patience is a virtue.
 

The "check back soon" part did bother me a bit (as a severe forumoholic), but geez, this is a bit of a severe reaction, you might want to put some lotion on it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif

The worst part was, the second day, when it was the same relentless "check back soon" message, hope started to dwindle. And on sunday, when they did it AGAIN, I didn't even bother checking back soon at all. To me, "soon" in computer time has a sort of Attention Deficit imminence. Like, really, if you refresh the page right now it might work. No? How about now? I like unknown a lot. I can deal with unknown, it tells me not to concern myself with it, because I don't have enough information to understand, and no one who DOES have that info is going to take the time to explain it, rather than working on the issue.


BUT, on the third hand (yes I have three hands, AND??), I am extremely disappointed that after this 3 day goose chase of promised upgrades - there seems to be absolutely nothing changed whatsoever in the forums. However as Gandalf has pointed out, I am quite pleased and relieved to note that we seem to have all our data here still, so someone is doing a good job regardless of their erroneous and probably canned downtime message. <3

Re: Patience is a virtue.
 

Your mechanic would be unlikely to be spouting some default message.
For all you know (I wish I could remember from working with UBB) that message was not put there by Shrapnel. It might be like the default error messages that a browser gives you when it cant find something on a website, which is configurable but few ever bother to change it.

But it does bring a common complaint to mind from the system techs. "If I think Im about to fix it, why would I go to the user page and update the time frame? What would I change it to? Something like 'I know its been a couple of hours but I still think it will be fixed soon'?". I always hated leaving a job to update a wag time. Thats Customer Supports job to placate the whiners... umm... I mean users. The only time I ever updated a wag was to put "OK the easy quick update patch blew up, so now it will be 6 hours for us to recover the system back to what it was before we tried to upgrade it"

Re: Patience is a virtue.
 

"On the gripping hand," you mean. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I dunno, it seems like the forums might be a bit faster to refresh when I post. It's hard to tell. Kind of like it's hard to tell whether shields work against missiles the way the manual describes or at half-strength. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

-Max

Re: Forum Outages
 

Come on guys, give them a break, if we were paying for a service then I would expect notification. Here's a sugestion though, make a batch file that sends a email to forum members telling them when the forum is going to be up or down. Thank you for this game and the forum that is simply wonderful. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif Bwaha

Re: Forum Outages
 

I agree with everything said by Bwaha (what a nick) ^^

And I add that even if I like this forum, I'm not so addicted I can't live 3 or 4 days without it ^^

Re: Forum Outages
 

Everything has its pros and cons. Mass mailing like that has many drawbacks. It pretty much eats a server, and it can get Shrapnels server on a blacklist.

Re: Forum Outages
 

Most mechanics expect us to pay them for fixing our cars. If on the other hand my mechanic is a friend who happens to be letting me drive his car and it breaks down, I don't think I would feel right complaining about how long he said it would take to fix it before letting me drive it again.

And I must say that equating that message to "lying" and being "dishonest" is a real stretch. "Short amount of Time" and "Check back soon" involve generic measurements of time and mean different things to different folks.