Skip to main content

Once again, this is not the first time I have mentioned this issue, but today was, once again, news about an issue - technical on facebook and twitter and who knows where else. Sure was not on "Auctiva community forum" said loosely as the community seems to be several communities of which one is excluded from some of the announcements that have impact on the entire community. This sort of explains I guess why we sometimes think forums are dead, it is because the community is split in several places now.

I realize the hope on facebook is to get "friends" and business for auctiva, and that is GREAT! BUT, not at the expense of those who others who are your customers right now. You know the song "Make New Friends but Keep the old?" I am guessing facebook is to make new friends...but you are doing so at expense of the older members.

IF anyone had problems there were some technical issues today that were announced on facebook??? AND Twitter? Here is cut/paste of announcement from facebook:

We experienced some technical issues around 5 PM (PDT) that may have made it difficult to log in to the site. Our tech team has things up and running again and we apologize if you were hit with the problem.

Auctiva, is that where we need to go for our announcements???? I have asked this before on MANY occasions and to be honest it infuriates me that we go to forums and NOTHING there...?? If facebook, tweeting is required for auctiva, then everyone needs to be made aware of that. So I will ask again?

Auctiva DO we need to get community announcements on technical issues, and other site issues from facebook/twitter/blog or other social sites?

Seems if it is on facebook and tweeting around, as a courtesy to those who use the forums it should be posted there also. Since that is where most people go if there is a technical issue?

Other forum members...do you depend on facebook, twitter, blog, when you have a problem or do you go to forums? Maybe I am just old fashioned and go to forum where I am a member to find out about issues??

AUCTIVA??? WHY would this NOT be posted on FORUMS????. I would think this was just "forgotten" but I mentioned this just about on August 6th and post was ignored though have since seen ad on pages. I have previously mentioned when auctiva had TOTAL OUTAGES in th past that were on other sites and not updated on forums at all or for HOURS later on community forums.

Thanks for some kind of information...feel like a dog chasing my tail here and honestly do not feel that we should be required to go to outside source to get our information. Yes, to me facebook, twitter and blogs are outside sources.

Seems to me that posting on Activa forums is logical place to put auctiva technical issues or announcements.

Again, perhaps an "announcement page" would help and keep this information where all of us can see it.

Thanks
Last edited {1}
Original Post

Replies sorted oldest to newest

Hi lookandbuyme,

No, our Community Forum will continue to be out main avenue for publicly communicating about technical problems and you should not have to look at our social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter for updates of this nature.

We are working on generating more activity on our social networking and we obviously have some kinks to work out, but we will do our best to ensure any messaging about technical problems are consistent between our forum and other sites moving forward.

In this case, the issue in question was very short lived and did not generate any other activity on our Community Forum, but I certainly understand how seeing this post on our Facebook page may have suggested that we expect users to check there for updates.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

-Mike
just an example of how etsy handled their issues

from: Etsy Explains Causes of Its Recent Site Outages
By Ina Steiner
EcommerceBytes.com
August 21, 2012


Etsy had several unrelated site outages since July 30, and in a forum post on Monday, John Allspaw, Senior VP of Technical Operations at Etsy, explained what happened, how the company handled the outages, and what it's doing to help prevent them in the future. Allspaw explained the nature of the outages in great detail.

In the case of the July 30th outage, Etsy said it had been upgrading its databases to make two improvements to the site. One upgrade was made to allow Etsy to add support for new languages - it has already added German, French, Italian, Dutch and Japanese in addition to English, but plans to support additional languages in the future.

The other upgrade was an improvement to how Etsy's databases did nightly backups, "because they were slowing the site down when they ran."

Etsy said, "We expected to make those improvements separately. Instead, they were accidentally made at the same time. In order to confirm that there was no data loss or corruption during the accidental upgrade, we took the site down while we verified everything was in order, which it was. We brought the site back up." That was the "short version" of what happened.

In "the longer version," Etsy explained that the engineer who deployed the fix for the backup didn't know that it would be coupled with the database upgrade. "When we detected this was happening, we disabled the site in order to make sure we weren’'t going to corrupt or lose any data, and manage the upgrade more gracefully."

Etsy then explained it was making changes to the way it does large upgrades and would be bolstering its automated tools to make it clearer to the engineers what is being deployed.

On August 10, Etsy had another outage. The space it set aside for creating unique ID numbers for the various elements on Etsy.com (such as shops, listings, treasuries, etc.) was not large enough.

"When a new member registers, or a new shop opens, or a new listing is uploaded, we go to a special set of servers to get a new unique ID number for it. The job of those servers is to make sure that no IDs get reused for the same thing. For example, we don'’t want two shops to get the same ID number, because if they did, we couldn’'t be sure which one we should show listings from when a buyer wants to browse one of those shops."

Etsy needs to tell its servers in what range the numbers will be so they can set aside space and memory for them. When it realized the space it had set aside for some of the ID numbers wasn't large enough, it took the site down. "After confirming all was okay, we brought the site back online again, and began proactively looking for and enlarging ranges that might overflow in the future."

However, it left treasuries and parts of activity feeds disabled. "Being able to disable some features is one of the things we do, precisely for situations like this. We don'’t want to prevent shoppers from buying items just because the Treasury and Activity Feed weren'’t behaving correctly, so we brought the site up without them."

Etsy is making some changes to help prevent such incidents from happening in the future, including changes to its database - "We would rather a member get an error message than allow for data to be corrupted."

Etsy then went on to describe "Other Outages and Degradations," such as one on August 18.

Etsy said when there are unexpected outages, it is presented with a decision:

Keep the site online and risk either being too slow to be usable or taking in bad data.
Take the site offline in order to fix the slowness and verify that the data is correct.
"In each of the cases, we decided to take option #2, because it’'s safer for the community."

Allspaw wrapped up the explanation with these words:

"I wrote this blog post to give you the confidence you deserve that we take outages seriously, are willing to give detailed information about them, and that our aim is to learn from each one in order to lessen the possibility of another in the future."

Add Reply

Copyright © 1999-2018 Auctiva.com. All rights reserved.
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×