Digital Art Zone

... where you click on the “Add to Cart button”, it says the product has been added to your cart but your item count shows zero and your cart is empty?

You can repeat the process ad infinitum and nothing gets added to your shopping cart.  Then, maybe hours later, when you have given up, the item(s) suddenly appear.  By then, the moment has passed and a DAZ published artist has lost a sale.

Does the agony of this fatally flawed web site migration NEVER END? !!!

Is this what DAZ are going to subject their customers to until finally there is no-one left buying (or even able to buy) and they have to file for Chapter 11?

And the thing is, it’s inconsistent.  Some days it works, some days it doesn’t.

Somebody should have been sacked for this fiasco.  Instead, they’re probably going to give him a bonus and an expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas!

(In case anyone comments: Cookies and cache were cleared, logged out, logged in, multiple browsers were tried on multiple machines. etc. etc. Same problem.)

Greetings,
Unfortunately, looking at your post time, you’re at around midnight DAZ time.  Sometime between 11pm and 1am their time they do something which intermittently locks up the database, and folks can’t do shopping cart operations until it’s done.  All the operations are queued, but it silently queues them instead of telling you, so it looks like nothing’s happening.

I’m sure it’s on their list of ‘to be fixed’ problems, but I bet it’s deeper down the Magento rathole than they ever expected to have to go.

If I were to hazard a guess, it’d be that they’re running daily statistics for sales reports for themselves and the PA’s, and carts/sales being active might gum that up.  I think there are better ways to do that, but I’m sure it’s the best they could do with the resources and knowledge they have, and I’m VERY sure that there are circumstances beyond my knowledge that make them do things this way.

— Morgan

Ah, I think that it was around that time when I had the same issue, so there may be something to that, Cypherfox.  When, after multiple attempts to put one item in my cart, I finally ended up with about 6.  When I couldn’t delete, I moved them to my wishlist. . .  and had to delete all those the next day.  I have since figured out that you just have to wait, but this is a favoured shopping time for me (well, OK, I’ll shop any time) so something to watch.

Cypherfox - 24 July 2012 12:30 AM

I’m sure it’s on their list of ‘to be fixed’ problems, but I bet it’s deeper down the Magento rathole than they ever expected to have to go.

I have been buying content from DAZ for years and it never happened before “Magento” was installed. The truth is that the new web site solution was not tested. It was just dumped on people without any consideration for the consequences.

The testing is now. The testers are us. The nightmare continues.

Still, I expect it’s nice in the Bahamas at this time of year.

The truth is the site was tested but the move to the public servers introduced new issues that hadn’t been found by the testing groups.

Kidding?

Not at all

Richard Haseltine - 24 July 2012 05:06 AM

The truth is the site was tested but the move to the public servers introduced new issues that hadn’t been found by the testing groups.

Yeah caching and volume. Other than that everything worked okay, right?

Sigh

Hey, I kinow you guys tried and did your best. But this whole thing still reeks. And why can’t we have the old forums back? Just keep it totally separate from the store, make us get a new log in. I’d be happy with that. Then LEAVE IT ALONE.

chohole - 24 July 2012 09:12 AM

Not at all

Sorry for my comment. Maybe I missed the irony here.

Greetings,
I am curious; the forums seem remarkably stable and functional to me.  They’re missing two features, the avatars and post-bumping, but otherwise it behaves almost identically to the old forums.  If those two features were working, would that return it to acceptable behavior, or is there some other forum-based feature that I’m missing that is crucial to the experience?

— Morgan

Cypherfox - 24 July 2012 12:52 PM

They’re missing two features, the avatars and post-bumping, but otherwise it behaves almost identically to the old forums.

Three features. Colour options. The current forum appearance is not as bad as the original infliction of the previous big change, which caused migraines and eyestrain, and anyone prone to epilepsy had to be careful while scrolling. I don’t consider that a glowing endorsement. And the current complete and utter shambles of the store and PC means that has to be fixed first before the forums. There were fixes made in the first few weeks, but those were to critical functions; these three features aren’t as urgent, so we’ll just have to wait… some more.

It’s been two months...  <sigh>

Four features.

I’m on dial-up. I used to be able to right-click and open in new tab on four or five forum threads and then shift to the first and start reading it while images loaded. The new forum insists on downloading the entire paqge and all content BEFORE starting to render anything on the screen. Even worse, without the avatars, the page content is more than triple the old forum page size.

So I’m left looking at a blank screen for minutes at a time - and about 3 times out of five, after all the download activity finishes I STILL don’t get a srren rendered and have to reload the page. I’ve pretty much given up on the forums except when I’m at a wifi hotspot.

Cypherfox - 24 July 2012 12:52 PM

Greetings,
I am curious; the forums seem remarkably stable and functional to me.  They’re missing two features, the avatars and post-bumping, but otherwise it behaves almost identically to the old forums.  If those two features were working, would that return it to acceptable behavior, or is there some other forum-based feature that I’m missing that is crucial to the experience?

— Morgan

I think those two features would do it for me. A link to the newest post in the thread would be nice, but I can live without it.

Coldrake

Five features.

I remained logged into the old forums unless I logged out intentionally.

Now, I have to log in every visit, unless I visit and log into the store first.


Six features.

Old forums consistently notified you of a PM.  Didn’t matter where you were in the forums, if you had a PM, you knew it.

Now it’s hit and miss whether the forums indicate a PM.

Greetings,
I know that the old forums logged people out regularly; there are furious posts aplenty on that.  Just like here, it wasn’t happening to everybody.  Evidently the diagram of folks it is happening to has shifted.   I’m not saying it’s ‘okay’ to do that, but that it’s not a significant difference from the old forums.  (It should still be fixed, although keeping two sites (the forum and the store) logged in and in sync is a PITA.)

I don’t use the PM feature very much; I’ve never missed a PM, but I don’t know how the old system reported them.  (I don’t think I ever sent a PM on the old system, much less received one.)

The speed is unfortunate; a quick check of a mostly-text thread shows around 271K transferred, which is a lot.  Most of it is because they are using both jQuery and Prototype libraries, and Prototype isn’t minified.  They also aren’t aggregating their JavaScript files, or CSS, or using sprites, nor are many of their resources returning 304 not modified so the browser can cache them.  They are at least using compression…  I’m not sure how tuned the old site was, but I agree the current site is slow, from a web developer’s perspective.  I would strongly recommend trying another browser; a different browser might be willing to display the page before all the extra resources have loaded, albiet with a few visual inconsistencies as things pop into place.  One way or another, it’s definitely not designed for light browsing.

For theming, I think RAMWolff has a theming plugin for improving the color usage on the forums.  The key thing to remember, though, is that strong colors will alter the perception of images that are posted up.  A picture against a green background will be perceived differently than a picture against a neutral gray or white background.  I don’t recall if there’s a ‘better grays’ version of the theme, but there should be, to preserve the ability to see art in a neutral frame.

All those are very valid answers.  If you use PMs a lot, that feature means you’re a little less social in your own way.  The theme is perhaps too contrast-y for some eyes, which means you avoid the site consciously or unconsciously.  The speed is terrible for dial-up and satellite users, so they can’t spend as much time interacting.  The lack of post-bumping means you can’t gravitate to where the people are and get that hit of ‘social interaction’ which keeps you interested.  And a lack of avatars means you don’t have that visual connection to people’s images, so there isn’t as much a feeling of community.

I don’t think each of these problems affects everybody, but it does mean that everybody has a different gripe about the system.  (For example, I don’t use PMs, the theme works fine for me, I’m on a godawful fast connection, and I don’t recall being unexpectedly logged out since the old forums.)  This puts the bar at easing a significant part of the unhappy contingent pretty high.  Until a majority of that is resolved, a lot of people will still be very unhappy because they perceive little or no movement in the things they care about.

Thanks very much for the answers!  I wish I could do something about them the way I have with the old forum and the store’s UI issues, but most of those are things that DAZ has to fix, and that are generally hard even for experienced web dev teams.

— Morgan

Satira Capriccio - 24 July 2012 05:08 PM

Five features.

I remained logged into the old forums unless I logged out intentionally.

Now, I have to log in every visit, unless I visit and log into the store first.


Six features.

Old forums consistently notified you of a PM.  Didn’t matter where you were in the forums, if you had a PM, you knew it.

Now it’s hit and miss whether the forums indicate a PM.

How about eight features?

I frequent multiple sites and usually upload my images to DeviantArt and then link them here. Offsite image linking doesn’t work.

Likewise, you can’t link offsite to an image here.

For a site dedicated to ART, these are pretty big fricken’ oversights…