Un-"Scheduled" Maintenance... ?
BeeMKay
Posts: 7,019
in The Commons
I have to say I was a bit taken aback about six (or was that even more?) hours of maintenance that was dropped in our laps, without as much as a blink of a warning.
I hope that the next time, they DAZzlers at least post something on the site or the forum...
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Comments
I agree. A little warning would have been nice so we could get our orders in before DAZ midnight. Yeah, I know all the sales seem to be back; but even so.
I think "scheduled maintenance" means the site crashed and they know about it. As opposed to "unscheduled maintenance", when the site crashed and they don't know about it yet. :D
No, it was apparently scheduled. I'm not sure about the length, though.
Oh. In that case, a warning ahead of time would be nice indeed.
I tried to get on for over five hours. It could have been longer, but that's now long that I, personally, tried to get on. It's pretty weird to keep the site down for so long or not even give the community a heads up.
I would agree that a heads-up of maintenance would be both appreciated and polite.
I figured that's why there was no New Release that day, myself. So it did seem planned from that angle. I was wondering why they took the forums down too, though.
The funny thing was that the newsletter with the new releases DID come out during the maintenance. But the products themselves were not live even when the store came back online. :) It's all there now, though.
It would have been nice if they would fix the constant logging out issue that STILL persists regardless of all the tricks and "fixes" that have been mentioned. None work.
It's may be browser related, I use IE and never have any problems with being logged out. Or maybe it's because I always log into the store before I go to the forum.
I actually meant the 'Blowout Sale' which didn't come with any new releases!
I use IE (win7/IE11) and I now get logged out about once or twice a day. But there was a long period (a few months where I would only get logged out about once a week). I think it has to do with relative humidity, election results, and average temperature in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the price of tea in China.
Seems like Rendo is gone now... 403 error trying to access the base directory...?
Weird. Something fishy's going on.
Happens semi-regularly over there.
Laurie
I changed my password; been a while since I last did it, so it was time anyway.
... And like all internet sites I use, it is unique to here.
But there's a problem!
When I go into any featured artist's catalog they all have produced 574 products. LOL
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Yeah, I got trolled by them twice. Once when I got the newsletter and figured the site was back up and then
-- when it was back up and nothing new had been added to the Massive Blowout Sale. I thought for sure that they were bringing the store down to do some major stripping down of prices. lol
(I was checking every 30 minutes...okay maybe 15...)
Looks like the total 'number of products' thingy I mentioned above has been fixed.
(btw, I didn't used to have the problem at all but the last couple/few weeks I get logged outa here frequently.)
Well if you can't beat them, join them...
and this happened in the middle of the DAZ originals sale, the result being that I wasn't to able to purchase anything (from my long list of things) that I wanted to buy. The sale should have been extended by at least the number of hours lost due to the interruption. Better yet, do the next sale on a weekend, instead of during the week.
...yeah was a little miffed as I was doing test renders that were related to a discussion thread and was unable to post results all evening. stayed up later than usual hoping it would come back online but by 01:00 local time (before giving up) as I was planning to get something with my PC+ coupon in the DO sale because I was going to be away all day Friday. Didn't get back on the site until after 00:00 Daz time Friday/Saturday).
Two things that bothered me about this:
1. No advance notice (for example, Fantasy Attic gives a 1 - 2 day advance email warning to their community when they schedule downtime for their site and it is usually during low usage hours).
2. The timing. This fell right during what was essentially "prime time" for most of North, Central, and South America, as well as the Pacific (Hawai'i, Japan, Eastern Australia, New Zealand. Even had it only lasted for the planned hour thirty duration, it still was a major disruption at the wrong time.
When I was dealing with system operations in college we always scheduled routine maintenance during the lowest user demand as well as posted sufficient advance notice.
Real-world example -- manufacturing environment. We were completely integrated, so if the primary application was down people went home. We had a regularly scheduled 3-hour window (midnight Saturday to 3:00 AM Sunday) for off-line backups. Impacted 1 shipping warehouse and they used the time for cleanup and maintenance. I got 6 - 6-hour shutdowns per year; one week notification required -- and the first 3 hours of the window was tied up in the backups (midnight Saturday to 6:00 AM Sunday). And 2 - 24 hour outages, midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday -- one month advance notification required. This usually gave me 18 hours to work in, because it invariably required a full off-line backup after I finished and the first backup, before I started, had priority.
Lack of warning, etc. is inexecusable now that DAZ is selling DRM'd products. One reason I refuse to buy those -- DAZ has given no indication they are ready to support it by changing their proccesses to include warnings, status updates, etc. for outages.
FWIW, it was also a pain in the anatomy just reading the forums. I do it the way I always have, open a browser tab for each page of new threads, and work my way through that. The last thing I do before beginning to read is select Mark Forums Viewed, to update all the "New" markers. The big problem with that is the way the new forums work compared with the last few times they were changed; now, if there's ever a glitch in my browser, instead of re-reading the page stored in my local cache, my browser tosses the cache and fetches the current page — which has the updated "New" markers and could be hours out of synch with what I was just reading. It's annoying.
Another annoyance is the error messages I got when I discovered the downtime. The actual downtime page whenever I tried to look at something new was all right, nice and clear; but when I tried to click on a star to bookmark a thread, nothing happened except a big dark grey box appeared in the lower left corner. I looked closer and realised the dark grey box had slightly darker grey text almost invisible in it: "405 Forbidden". What sort of error message is that for a "site down" condition? And why was it almost unreadable?
Come to think of it, a lot of the error messages I see in those bottom left boxes don't make much sense. Has anyone looked at them since the forum software was installed? Especially the one that comes up when the forum suddenly doesn't know what to do with a press of the "Post Comment" button; can't remember the exact words, but it's just a bit jabberwocky.