FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - AA Chat Board Down for Hours
View Single Post
Old May 18, 2001 | 6:19 am
  #11  
Randy Petersen
Founder of FlyerTalk
 
Join Date: May 1998
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Posts: 6,540
Info Tech Traveler: you have mail. Excuse me, I for a second thought I could email you regarding this but then I noticed that unlike the vast majority of members, including other IT professionals you have elected to not be able to communicate with. Having a visible email address would have made informing you of our progress easier.

Sorry, but in abiding by the TOC of FlyerTalk, I'm not able to make available a "list" of reasons as you have done above. Your email address would have allowed me to do so in private. Anyway, pick on me any way you want, just don't bad mouth my employeees.

As an update, we rely on other IT Professionals to run the board. For instance, we license the software and when bugs happen like mentioned above, we immediately contact these other IT Professionals for solution ideas. Also, we don't run our server in-house. Rather, we are a dedicated server at a Server Farm and we also have contacted them for opinions on what this burp was about. As of that same day, and actually another, neither of the two IT Professionals we contacted have been able to provide us with any suggestions as to what the problem is/was. So, lacking anything back from the other IT Professional's, we've just continued on to try and keep the board up and available for you. In reading over the threads here, I think we thuoght that you were alerted to the fact we were aware and working on it. Without answers we just keep plugging away. If and when one of the IT Professionals from either the board software company or the Server Farm gives us a concrete answer as to what happened, we will let you know, but since we are dependent of these other IT Professionals, there's not a lot we can do other than not spam the board with minute by minute news notices that we simply don't know what the problem is/was or spend that same time trying to focus on solutions.

And, Info Tech Traveler, before you get a chance to comment on why we posted an announcement to drop the board for an hour yesterday, let me tell you. We've been running a replacement beta board in the background and needed to test it on our server without a double board strain. Because there is virtually no "slow" time on FlyerTalk to test, we felt we had no choice but to drop the board for an hour and pound the new beta board like hell to test. Honestly we were dissapointed with the performance and have asked the IT Professionals with the new board software company to review. The facts seem to be that the size of the traffic and the shear number of posts on this board are making some obstacles for us, but we are very active in a new solution. And we are running close to high end Sparc Station servers for FlyerTalk in case you want to comment on the hardware.

Anyway, my apologies for any inconvenience. We were in the middle of a full beta test on a new board when these AA problems popped up and frankly we were occupied elsewhere. Alas, name me any IT Professional that hasn't experienced the same situation.
Randy Petersen is offline