Forum Outages

[NTJedi]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.