Alert: Site Maintenance Mnnday, March 6

hello joe.
my pictures were down today,and the alert that i got yesterday said that it be moved today.i put a notice in all my listings that the picture server was down and that was why you couldn't see my pictures to my listings.is it going to happen again, and i need to leave the notices in my listings for the time being r can i now remove them,thank you susan

Hi,

When the move is made things will be down for a bit, but after that it should be smooth sailing. It's probably a good idea to leave the notice around until we're fully switched over.

Joe

Will buyers have problems completing transactions while the servers are down?

abcdogstore,

Yes, if you use Auctiva checkout, your customers will not be able to check out during the time when the site is offline.

-Mike

How can we add pictures through ebay to a listing. Hope all goes well but I just want to be prepared. Thanks, Mike

Just a heads up, not only will pictures be down, but some auction templates will not display correctly. Templates such as "garden box" use a .jpg in the background. If you are using custom text, such as white text on green background, your item descriptions may not be visible.

Good luck on the move on Friday night. I'm anxious to see the differences on Saturday.

what about a white text on a red background?
do i need to change that to a different color

most of my listings are ending saturday .Do you have a time table of when everything should be completed?

Did you get an answer to this? I have 4 auctions ending and NO PICTURES!!!!!!!

And by the way. It is not 9PM and my pictures are down! If it was down when you said it would be i wouldn't be in a panic. How can I get pictures up for auctions that end today?!

I thought I had a handle on the image down time-Last night I determined that 9pm pst- was three hours after my auctions ended so I didn't really have anything to worry about other than other auctions that had plenty of time on remaining on them- and could deal with losing images for the specified down time. After I loaded images onto photobucket for the auction that ended tonight- i decided i didn't need to add to my description ( i had bids) and went to bed with some peace of mind. Now I just checked on my auction thats ending in 6 hours and no images- I should've added the photobucket images just to be safe, but too late now. grrrrrr.! HOWEVER, i do appreciate auctiva and its "freeness" so I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me- just wanted to get that off my chest.

Ruth,,If your auctions are ending today, have bids or less than 12hrs I think you are in the same boat as me (& probably many of us).

Big Problems here..

Ebay in the UK is doing a 50% off listings today, so I thought I would take advantage and get some listings up using features or highlights, something I don't normally bother with.
It's now 18.27 here and only 10.27 PST but the servers are down already!!
I thought I would have time to load my listings to Ebay before the servers were supposed to go down at 21.00 PST. I've got over a dozen listings waiting to go and I can't get them

Anyone got any idea what's going on ?

However as has been mentioned - it's free - don't bite the hand etc. etc!

Hey StuggyStuff,

In anticipation of images being down, I've been uploading all my images for new listings to photobucket dot com (they are free too). '

As well as currently most of my autiva hosted images are down (even though it is only 1:15 PST), but my photobucket ones seem to always be steady. I just don't rely on them soley either!

Good luck

Hi Mystic,

I agree, I've used photobucket for a while and have recommended it in other forums. I always upload the same images as I do with Auctiva. I think the problem starts when Ebay has two image sources. I keep a second account on Ebay just so I can look at my listings as a buyer would and a lot of the time if you rely on two hosting services then the listings end up looking very untidy and not professional.
I'd love Auctiva to be up and available all the time but that will never happen unless they generate more money from somewhere. It's absolutely brilliant as a free service, but in the end it is free so what can you do ?

Regards, Stu

"unless they generate more money from somewhere" begs the question, do you buy insurance from them? If more sellers required insurance on their listings, they would have plenty of revenue and we would not have to wonder if they will start charging for the service. Besides insurance does give some peace of mind.

Auctive missed out on a resonable sum of insurance money from me this week purely because a. i don't have the checkout enabled as a lot of my sales are combined shipping which it can't handle and b. the completed transactions haven't been relayed from ebay to auctiva so i haven't been able to purchase the insurance for customers! I've had to got with usps or ups and i wouldn't be surprised if it was about $10 worth of insurance just this week alone. My completed transactions list is missing approx 40 items! Lost revenue is all i can say!

Hi Roamer,

No I don't buy insurance BUT only because I'm based in the UK. I've asked in another forum whether it may be available in the UK at some point.
I would love to buy insurance through Auctiva.
I don't know anything about the USA but postal insurance over here is totally restrictive.
You can have 'recorded' i.e signed for, but that only covers about $60 and that's if you're lucky AND you can be a***d to fill in all the paperwork AND the recipient is helpful.
The next one we have above that is the proper insured package but that STARTS at $15 per item.
PLEASE give me an insurance deal that I can use over here.
I've recommended Auctiva to loads of people but unfortunately all are UK based, so in a way we are using resources for free with no way of compensating for that.
As I've said, even though it's free it is really great to use and I'd love to help.

That's up to Auctiva management.....

Regards, Stu

Jeff - I can't imagine what you are thinking. My response in oh so slow thread was an attempt to get you to step back and make some tough decisions. Having been in the outsourcing business most of my life, I would have been fired for trying to do what you are doing. Programming 101, when you have serious problems, keep your head and do not make drastic, hasty changes. If you have doubts, what are too think? Your the CEO for godsakes! Don't air your doubts in this forum, get enough technical expertise to analyse the situation adn advise you, then make a decision and stick to it, good or bad.

Since you seem to be having trouble deciding, if I were voting (well I guess I am since I am taking everything off of auctiva like most others) I would follow the suggestions I had in the other post. Manage the problems you have now as you get your users to saftey. By that I mean an orderly shut down of your service, tell us all to quit using the service, hell our auctions can't be running for more than 10 days. If you prevented any new activity starting right now, in 10 days you could make this entire move RISK FREE. You would not have to be worrying if you were going to introduce more pain or not. I am having a hard time understanding why this is not the obvious path!

I hope other post but if you told me I needed to stop using the service for 30 days while you moved to your new data center and that you wouldn't let me back on until you were sure you had a service that could provide the stellar service you want to provide. Guess what, not only would I respect that decision, but I would think, wow, auctiva has my interest as their primary concern, you know, turn this into as good of thing as you can. I would be happy to come back at the point in time you let us all know you thought you had a handle on things and I would come back with little fear.

Making a move with all of us using the service and being so unsure, well I can't imagine not always being afraid that poor IT decision's may bite me at any time.

I hope others will share their views. Jeff, I am not trying to slam you, I stated that in my other post. I even invited you to email me personally, but I do feel strongly the current situation is not being handled in your customers best interest. I have a selfish reason to see that change because as I mentioned in my other post, I would really like to see activa survive however in my outsourcing experience, activa is making bad decisions on top of bad problems and I fear that might not be survivable.

Good Luck in whatever path you choose, I personally, as with your other customers, will be better served if your path works out!

Hiya Jeff--let us know if you will be postponing tonight's move. I have listings scheduled to list on 3/12 (a fair amount of time/cushion), but if you forsee postponement, do let us know so I can reschedule/move up my listings. I check your community board everyday when I log in as I'm sure everyone else is doing the same. No complaints here~just anxiously waiting for the big day!! ;-)

NEED ONFO!!! FIRST IT WAS GOING TO BE THURSDAY.THE ALERT SAID FRIDAY NOW I HAVE ANOTHER ALERT STATING THAT IT WILL BE MONDAY ,WHICH IS IT?????

The change was going to be on Thursday, then Friday, and now Monday? OOOH MY!

Jeff,

You do what you think is best for your peice of mind and for the service that you have set up for us. If it means taking a few baby steps then so be it. Personaly I can hardly wait for the move as it will mean more uptime and reliability.

Well good, at least I'll have the weekend to post and then I can sweat out the down time Monday into Tuesday. Let's pray it gets done this time and done right. Good Luck Jeff and Co.

I wish you guys could stick to a decision. You keep dragging this out and putting it off and for what? Shut it down and move the thing already, one of 2 things is going to happen.
1. everything goes smoothe and your back up in a couple of hours.

2. It's a total disaster everyone walks away from the site.


If you can change the move to Monday then why not Monday 3/13/06 that gives us 9 days notice and those of us who don't want to chance losing money monday and tuesday when the images are not working can tak this monday and tuesday off so our listings are not effected.

Jeff is just contributing to his own stress and the staff's stress by making announcements and not going through with it and then you got to hear people like me bitching about it.

Would all this explain why recent aucions added to Ebay are not showing up in my Store Window?

I just do not get it! The guys at Auctiva are doing thier best to make this transition as easy as possible and you keep complaining. This is a BIG deal for all of us with auctions running through thier site. I have nearly 50 ending on Sunday night. If this were ebay you would get NO notice of anything. You would wait three days for a canned response. They are being as honest as possible. Personally I have listed some auctions at ebay just to be safe, but I am very anious to get back here to list. The service is great and I am getting great prices for my items with the extra pictures and templates. So please be patient for a week and let them get this done and then come back and enjoy the benifits.

I'm not really complaining about the service or the website I am simply upset that last night I expected this to all be over today. Now it's monday. Then it will be tuesday then thursday then next wednesday. So why not give it a week tell us straight up "Hey we are moving the servers next monday." Don't like it don't list for auctions to end at those times. End of story. If this were a NY based company they'd be done already because they'd have their ba!!s cut off if they didn't. Yeah yeah I know I know Impatient New Yawker. What can I say I love this site I am even considering the insurance thing like you said I just have to get all the info. I am working from it right now infact scheduling photos from tonight from saved ads and it's so easy to work with. I can't complain about anything else here. I never really have except last week when things went a little hay wire. LIke I said I am not really as upset as I sound about this. I have 23 ending monday and one that I know will go up over $100 so if this were all done last night I wouldn't have to worry about it now. But I am going to SD and revising mondays items so that I am using their code instead of auctiva for monday and tuseday. Why because I sell collectible magazines and don't want to take a chance of losing bids if they pull the plug before my listings end.

We just have to face there is no good time to do this. I was sweating Sunday Night as I expect it to top 2500.00 and maybe more. I start all my new listings on Sunday as well. So I have for this week listed a dozen here and 20 to 30 more over at the bay. If all is well by thursday next week I will be back here with 40 to 60 more auctions to list. Since this is my living I have to protect my weekly income. But this is a very nice easy to use site and I will just have to work around the big change. Think how much fun it is to move you home stereo Tv Surround Sounds Etc. Well this is SO much bigger and has a lot more riding on it so an easy transition for us all is worth the wait.

I understand the reason he waited but I just wish they planned it a little better and informed us sooner. I know they mentioned it in here but I usually don't get in here. I am averaging 2000-2500 a week too but I need to work and have listings working to get there. Thursday killed me. I am working now to make up for it though and I rushed yesterday to bang out 40 more. When I say bang out thats 12 hours between scanning/listing/ and of course my favorite goofing off time. I seem to do a lot of goofing off in 12 hours. But I work from home so I tend to get way to distracted. Anyway I am using SD as a back up and hopefully they won't decide to crash like they usually do.

HEY YOUSE AUCTIVA MUGGZ: No peeking at my dirty pictures while you are moving the servers. Hmmm I bet thats what is taking so long these guys are reviewing all of my photos.

OK...I see the move has been postponed. I just want to be clear so I know when I can start launching stuff again. Some stuff has been moved and is being tested - the rest of the servers will be moved on Monday - so are we still looking at a possible 12+ hours of downtime, or less? Is Monday firm for moving? I am anxious to get stuff listed again, but have been holding off so that my listings aren't missing photos and templates during the auction period.

I know this must be a stressful time for you guys and I appreciate the updates - I just want to plan around any outages. Thanks. :-)

quote:

Originally posted by efilnikcufecin:
HEY YOUSE AUCTIVA MUGGZ: No peeking at my dirty pictures while you are moving the servers. Hmmm I bet thats what is taking so long these guys are reviewing all of my photos.

Pete, is that you?

(serendipity)

I don't use my regular ID in teh forums because it leads to problems with jealous competitors., Yes it's me sharky.

Jeff I have over 40 listings saved on auctiva and 40 images saved here right now. I use this account for my non mature audience items.

erm, well 90 listings over the weekend that showed no pictures, apparently an ebay problem so maybe not all above is auctivas fault, ebay never got back on a refund though and all listings had to be cancelled. but today three listings as a test, none showing, saw them briefly without pictures and then they dissapeared. Good luck auctiva in sorting it all out and yes shipping insurance doesn't apply to Hong Kong people either so maybe even a donations box might help i'm sure some users in the community wouldn't mind a small amount each month

I doubt it was Auctiva, Homedogs, I didn't hear of anyone else with this problem, and my listings have been showing images even now, after the maintenance has started.

I have had pictures up and running all weekend but they are gone now that the big move is underway.

Well sorry to say I'm glad, at frist I thought it was just me! Mine too...all pictures bye-bye!
Hope they are back soon for all of us!!
Thanks for posting as I have been waiting to see if someone eles had this problem too!

We are really new here & we've been having some trouble with getting our ebay listings imported so that we can use the viewtracker.. I'm guessing it has something to do with Site Maintenance?? We were really excited about seeing how it works.. Could someone maybe help or suggest or answer this for us?? Pleeease?.. Thank you.....