Forum Outages

HoneyBadger · #1 July 9th, 2008, 03:49 AM

Thank you for making my point for me, NTJedi, in your own confused and convolutey way. It's nice when I don't have to work to win an argument, even if the defeated party doesn't always grasp the implications of their own suicide.

And thank you Mindi, Richard, various moderators, and other behind-the-scenes personalities, for your gynormous amounts of hard work and dedication!

Edi · #2 July 9th, 2008, 04:44 AM

Thanks for taking the time to explain things, Mindi, and to Bwaha and JimMorrison and others for their contributions to it. It's a good thing I did not see this before or I'd have been liable to blow my stack bigtime.

A few outages of a few hours each over a holiday weekend are nothing, especially ahead of a major upgrade and considering the service is normally up 24/7/365 and provided free of charge.

At work I get customers every now and then who get out of line and start yelling and screaming and accusing me and my coworkers of dishonesty and other things and generally being abusive. What we do is we tell them we have absolutely no obligation to put up with behavior like that and to call back later when they can behave civilly and then we hang up on them. Some of the complaints in this thread fall strictly into this latter category.

Lingchih · #3 July 9th, 2008, 05:01 AM

Hold on Edi. Don't blow your stack. This has been a fairly civil discussion so far. I agree with you totally, but let's keep it civil.

Edi · #4 July 9th, 2008, 05:15 AM

Quote:

Lingchih said:
Hold on Edi. Don't blow your stack. This has been a fairly civil discussion so far. I agree with you totally, but let's keep it civil.

Not going to do so now, since everything ahas been settled. As I said, if I'd seen it earlier, I probably would have. Now I've no problem with it.

NTJedi · #5 July 9th, 2008, 12:33 PM

Quote:

Gandalf Parker said:
How can you possibly provide a more accurate assessment than "we think it will be soon" on any project they havent done before?

Please read my previous post #622020 - 07/08/08 12:05 PM

No need for me to repeat myself.

Quote:

JimMorrison said:
You see, this website does NOT have customers. This website, does NOT provide a paid service to anyone. The literature provided with your software, and the purchasing agreement does NOT entitle you to 24 hour services of a professionally run and operated website. While they do a great job of actually presenting one to you, it is in fact a courtesy that this website is provided - ultimately no matter how well meaning your griping is, the tone comes off only as ungrateful and demanding.

Actually this website does have customers because we provide traffic to their website. The more we visit the website the more we are exposed to their advertising of products and the more likely we are to recommend them to friends. There are many categories of customers, not just those who purchase service A. Everyone visiting the forums are potential future customers.

I'm not demanding anything I'm providing advice to make the website more customer friendly during outages. Providing a more accurate timeline is an improvement compared to a generic measurement which can be misleading since some will intrepret "short time" as being 1 hour.

Again I'm providing advice so messages are not misleading and intrepreted as dishonest by some during forum outages.

Edi · #6 July 9th, 2008, 01:30 PM

NTJedi:
There is no way to say this nicely, so I won't even try to sugarcoat it. You are practically the only one who has his panties in a bunch over this and right now your posts are sounding like nothing more than a continuous whine. They come across as sanctimonious lecturing and touting your personal opinions as fact. Here's a hint: They are not.

As has been said previously, "short" is a relative term and the outages we have experienced here have been short given all the factors that are relevant. This website is not a time-critical application where entire businesses are hanging in the balance and if it's down a few hours a few times ahead of a major upgrade, that's short, end of story.

I get to deal with customers complaining about subscription services not working or having problems every day and there's a certain difference in the way paying customers and non-paying customers are handled. If a customer has purchased a service that has a 2-hour response time come Armageddon or Apocalypse, then he by damn gets that response, but he's also paying through the nose for it. If it's a normal DSL customer, time to fix the problem is 2-5 days with best effort delivered. If they don't like it, they can take their complaints and shove them, though I'm not allowed to say that to their face.

This forum here falls into the goddamn services-provided-for-free category, so the users really do not have any right to expect that their complaints about "short" downtime equating to 1-2 hours be accepted as a matter of course. Every reasonable effort to minimize aggravation to Shrapnel users has been made, so what's the problem?

Tifone · #7 July 9th, 2008, 01:37 PM

wow, mister edi says things in da face

NTJedi · #8 July 9th, 2008, 02:56 PM

Quote:

Edi said:
You are practically the only one who has his panties in a bunch over this and right now your posts are sounding like nothing more than a continuous whine. They come across as sanctimonious lecturing and touting your personal opinions as fact. Here's a hint: They are not.

I'm only providing advice to ShrapnelGames so some of their customers are not mislead during future forum outages. I'm providing this advice because as a common visitor the current outage message can be intrepreted as misleading.

Quote:

Edi said:
As has been said previously, "short" is a relative term and the outages we have experienced here have been short given all the factors that are relevant.

I'm only advising the term "short" and "check back soon" be updated/changed to provide more accurate timeframes for the customers. Otherwise given a possible future scenario why not use "short" and "check back soon" even if the server was to be down for 2 days; 2 weeks; 2 months?? Since 2 months is short based on the lifespan of the average human.

Quote:

Edi said:
This website is not a time-critical application where entire businesses are hanging in the balance and if it's down a few hours a few times ahead of a major upgrade, that's short, end of story.

A few hours is short, unfortunately the forums were down for at least 12 hours.

Quote:

Edi said:
I get to deal with customers complaining about subscription services not working or having problems every day and there's a certain difference in the way paying customers and non-paying customers are handled. If a customer has purchased a service that has a 2-hour response time come Armageddon or Apocalypse, then he by damn gets that response, but he's also paying through the nose for it. If it's a normal DSL customer, time to fix the problem is 2-5 days with best effort delivered. If they don't like it, they can take their complaints and shove them, though I'm not allowed to say that to their face.

I'm not demanding anything, I'm only advising ShrapnelGames provide a more accurate outage message so it's less misleading to daily visitors.

Quote:

Edi said:
This forum here falls into the goddamn services-provided-for-free category, so the users really do not have any right to expect that their complaints about "short" downtime equating to 1-2 hours be accepted as a matter of course. Every reasonable effort to minimize aggravation to Shrapnel users has been made, so what's the problem?

I don't have any expectations for a change, I'm only advising the outage message is more accurate. As I posted earlier the term "short" and "check back soon" can be intrepreted as either 1 hour OR 2 weeks depending on who reads the message.

Whether or not ShrapnelGames chooses to provide more accurate outage messages is their decision, but as a customer it's my advice. I'm not expecting or demanding anything... just my advice.