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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:19 am
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jeffo46 wrote:
One more thing and that is, the print is just way too small as to trying to tell who is posting what on here . This is a complete failure !!! Bring back the old forum cause this one sucks !

This is a universal and reasonable critique. I expect that Brad will attend to that in due course.

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:39 am
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I have no problems with the site other than the two I mentioned earlier, BY CLICKING THE REPLY BUTTON that seems to be right where it always was. What are a lot of you talking about? Unless it is an "Apple" vs. "PC" thing (I have PC)...I just don't see a lot of these complaints.
One guy even said he hated it so bad, he was gonna take his ball and go home? LOL! :lol:


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:44 am
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ZZDoc wrote:
jeffo46 wrote:
One more thing and that is, the print is just way too small as to trying to tell who is posting what on here . This is a complete failure !!! Bring back the old forum cause this one sucks !

This is a universal and reasonable critique. I expect that Brad will attend to that in due course.


Obviously that is not going to happen.

What I do hope happens is that the next time there's a site upgrade, it gets planned and switched over "When you're ready", like what professionals do. This is the second time I've been through an upgrade with major downtime here, and both time people praised Brad for his hard work? Unbelievable. He shouldn't have had to work until late night at all if this had been planned. Certainly not with the site being down. No lessons were learned from the last time, and the same critique levered then, that this was done amateurishly, still stands.

I would certainly not have received praise for working late when screwing up and causing days of downtime - I would have been sent packing.
Next time I expect to see a smooth upgrade with no more than minutes of downtime while DNSes switch over - with or without Brad.


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:47 am
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White Dog wrote:
I have no problems with the site other than the two I mentioned earlier, BY CLICKING THE REPLY BUTTON that seems to be right where it always was. What are a lot of you talking about? Unless it is an "Apple" vs. "PC" thing (I have PC)...I just don't see a lot of these complaints.
One guy even said he hated it so bad, he was gonna take his ball and go home? LOL! :lol:

Yep. There are those who want their Maypo and want it now!!

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:56 am
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Then you got guys like arth1 who seem to be making 'demands' on a free site. Here's an idea....get used to it. It's not that big of a deal.


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:58 am
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arth1 wrote:
Obviously that is not going to happen..

An assumption which has yet to be proven true. I'm for sitting back and watching the river roll. It's not like this changeover has compromised the workings of the Affordable Care Act!! It's been basically a fancy chat room and online product shout-out since 2007. Seems that the conversation is flowing, your excellent, in-depth critical analyses notwithstanding. Unlax and let it roll out. :wink:

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:18 am
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White Dog wrote:
Then you got guys like arth1 who seem to be making 'demands' on a free site. Here's an idea....get used to it. It's not that big of a deal.


Free? Fender is buying goodwill, which is a quite strong currency.
And Fender uses the site for marketing. I bought a $2200 guitar based on "announcement" marketing posts here.

It's a site that reflects on the brand name of Fender. That means it requires some standards and professional handling. A corporation would be better served by closing its forums than running them badly.
My advice to Fender management is to hire a sysadmin or close the forums down, because repeated screw-ups does not reflect well on Fender.


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:28 am
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ZZDoc wrote:
Seems that the conversation is flowing, your excellent, in-depth critical analyses notwithstanding. Unlax and let it roll out. :wink:

It wasn't flowing yesterday. Or the day before. Someone screwed the pooch (again), and it reflects badly on Fender (again).

Yeah, I hope and trust that most of the problems will be fixed soon. I see that the boxes for QUOTE/CODE/LIST/LIST= have been remedied now - good. I expect other issues people see will be fixed too, perhaps starting with the flyspeck font size and missing reply button, both of which seem to affect a lot of people (not me, though).

But the point is that these problems should have been fixed before launch, and the launch shouldn't have taken the site down for days. That's a much bigger issue than the mere looks and functionality - it's a problem with wetware, not with software. The latter is easier fixed, and I expect it to be.


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:33 am
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What missing "Reply Button"? Am I the only one that has the damn button? It is right there!
When you are finished reading this reply, scroll down 1/4 of an inch, and look at the bottom left corner of this reply's window. Is it there? It is for me!

Oh, and arth1...does Nike owe you a Forum because you bought a pair of shoes from them? Stop it! If you think you can do better....design a site of your own, and run it the way you see fit. Nobody owes you jack!


Last edited by White Dog on Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:34 am
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Retroverbial wrote:
Gonna take some time to acclimate, I think.

This isn't a minor nose job or cheekbone tweak......it's a major facelift!

:shock:

Arjay


Long time no post, Arjay. Welcome back!

And someone needs to fix the style sheet. Most of it is fine but I would like to be able to tell who is posting.


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 8:46 am
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White Dog wrote:
Oh, and arth1...does Nike owe you a Forum because you bought a pair of shoes from them? Stop it! If you think you can do better....design a site of your own, and run it the way you see fit. Nobody owes you jack!


I'm not saying they owe me a forum. Where do you get that notion from? I'm saying that it's better if they had no fora than ones that reflects badly on the company. It's not about me, it's about Fender, and my advice (as earlier stated) is to either hire a sysadmin, or close it.
Despite me personally wanting to see the forums - I like talking to you guys.

(And for the record, I run quite a few web sites. With five nines uptime.)


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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 9:13 am
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En route with my daughter to the dentist, but let me hop by here for a second to offer a few quick replies:

  • The mysterious disappearing reply button - I'm seeing it too. Under active investigation, and we'll get 'er fixed.
  • Critique as to font size on the usernames - 100% agreed. Easy tweak which we'll do early next week.
  • Full width dropdown menus - yup, these are entirely silly. Will fix!
  • Comments from arth1 - as during last launch, I find your commentary here to actually be useful and would like to capture more factual detail in the days ahead. Also as during last relaunch, I don't find everything you've stated here to be 100% accurate and your comments continue to reveal to me that your own career has never resulted in exposure to the dynamics surrounding a launch of this nature - but that'd be a great "comparing notes" talk better suited to having over a beer or coffee some time if you're ever out in these parts. I don't mean the former as a condescending comment - I mean, my own background is in militaristically-planned, slower-paced software engineering so I can relate to where you're coming from. In the interim between now and our coffee talk, though, I have an uncomfortable feeling a few of your compadres here may give you a piece of their minds about your suggestions that the Forums be shut down entirely over a few minor fixes that need to be made in the week ahead ... :?
  • Specifically responding to the comment about Forums down three days: yes, indeed ... because when you turn Forums back on somewhat vindictive threads of this very nature tend to get started up by individuals like yourself and hence must wait until the site, proper, has been properly tended to. Sorry, but couldn't help but shake my head a bit at the irony there.
  • White Dog - thanks for making me laugh out loud, man. You win the Peacemaker prize on this thread. :-)
  • International sign-ins - acknowledged that certain visitors are having issues getting signed back in - one pain point that we're continuing to work through. Stay tuned for further update on that.

Will continue to monitor comments here - definitely seeing and acknowledging some tweaks needed here thus far but really appreciate everyone keeping it positive and friendly, whether you agree with what we've done here or not. :mrgreen:

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 10:20 am
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SKcoppertele wrote:
My phone runs I decently. (Nokia Lumia 920) but still miss the old site a bit.

Haven't tried access via my Android running 'stupid' phone yet.
As an aside, my auto insurance underwriter offered me a $60 discount if I 'went paperless'.
My response was as follows: "Let's talk about the wisdom of that further once you've done so in your bathroom". :wink:

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 11:06 am
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Brad Traweek - Fender wrote:
I don't find everything you've stated here to be 100% accurate and your comments continue to reveal to me that your own career has never resulted in exposure to the dynamics surrounding a launch of this nature


Not that it matters, but because you seem to think it does, I've been the senior sysadmin in charge of Fortune 100 web sites during upgrades, and in charge of the busiest user forum of a Fortune 20 tech company - around 10,000 messages per day. Right now, I'm responsible for servers on three different continents, including databases, real-time replication and downtime measured in minutes per year. I should be retired on a beach in Florida, but have too much fun working with what I love.

Brad Traweek - Fender wrote:
because when you turn Forums back on somewhat vindictive threads of this very nature tend to get started up by individuals like yourself and hence must wait until the site, proper, has been properly tended to. Sorry, but couldn't help but shake my head a bit at the irony there.


I never started a thread since the forum re-opened.
"Individuals like yourself"? Are we down to ad hominem now?

But again, the main problem isn't that there are glitches, nor that most of them probably could have been "properly tended to" before going live, but that there appears to be no release planning.
Upgrade a live site, taking it down for days in the process?
Instead of replicating it to a second instance, lowering the A record TTL, upgrading the mirror, in-house smoke testing, rollback to before the smoke testing, replication update, and a DNS change? It's not difficult, and if the company is too financially challenged to provide a HA+staging environment, it can even be done in-place on a single server.
Since you appear to be using phpBB, the phpBB site even provides documentation on how to upgrade without downtime.

You shouldn't have to work late at night to fight fires and get the site back up. I feel sorry for you, because surely this is bad planning from higher up.

When things go bad (as they are wont to), it should not affect customers, the company image or the sysadmin's personal life. At worst, a release might be delayed, but the customers see nothing of that, nor should they.
Sure there will be bugs that surface after launch. That's fixable. But a production site being down for three days? That should not happen.

Others manage to switch sites at the flip of a switch, because of release planning. Just two weeks ago, I upgraded a rather bigger site than this - multiple servers, 24-core, 96 GB RAM, terabyte-sized database, and a web front end, and the site was down for... oh, it wasn't. Sure, there were bugs which hadn't been caught, like notifications not going out due to a vendor program renaming a path, and URLs that had to be rewritten because now they contained spaces. I had time to get those fixed because I had three instances running - the old one, the new one, and a staging one to test fixes on.
I spent the night with my family instead of fighting fires, and I think you deserve that too, man.

Quote:
Will continue to monitor comments here - definitely seeing and acknowledging some tweaks needed here thus far but really appreciate everyone keeping it positive and friendly, whether you agree with what we've done here or not.

I agree with what you have done, just not the way it was done. Releases should be planned, not treated like a surprise attack by the enemy. A good release would have been:

Day -30 to -1: Mirror the site and do the upgrade on the mirror.
Day -7: Post a notice that there will be an upgrade.
Day 0: Switch to the new mirror. Pull the plug and switch back immediately if bugs appear that are critical. Set a new release time, update the notice, and fix the problems on a non-live site.
Day 1-next release: Once live, identify and fix minor problems that escaped QA or occurred due to things beyond your control (like new browser incompatibilities, security fixes breaking things, hardware or OS changes, marketing demanding support for Blackberry because a CFO has a Blackberry, IPv6 support, new ADA guidelines.... - you name it!)

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Post subject: Re: The forum's "new look"......
Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 11:52 am
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jeffo46 wrote:
One more thing and that is, the print is just way too small as to trying to tell who is posting what on here . This is a complete failure !!! Bring back the old forum cause this one sucks !



+1000


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