Official message boards down?

[Dunenewt]

You also have only the POV of the sender(s) when others are not permitted to reply with their own information and opinions.

Folks, if Dunenewt says it's okay to discuss this on the boards, I will. If he says not to, I will only discuss it in private. There is a very real possibility of a flamewar erupting from this, and not because I want one to.

Vanguard and Andrew are the bosses on this board.

[Hypatia]

Sorry, my mistake.  :-[

[Andrew]

Well Spanish movie episode does sound interesting.

And since Dunenewt said the word "bosses" it got me thinking of "bossman" from WWF (wrestling), which led to me spending 30 minutes reading wwf articles on wikipedia... and then I forgot why I was there in the first place.

Back on topic now :P

Doesn't sound like Vanguard wants a flamewar (I remember back many years ago when we decided to keep flamewars out of duniverse board when flamewars were popular). So I guess its better to keep it a secret for now.

I'll summarize what it would involve without knowing anything about it. People have disagreements at official forums, which leads members to forcibly or voluntarily leave and find somewhere else to spend time. The end. Hopefully no one sourced fed2k as fedaykin2k or else I'll have to get involved ;)

[Crysknife]

It wasn't just at the official forum. ;)

[SandChigger]

The accent being on <b>profitable</b>, Vanguard.

But as I believe has been pointed out elsewhere, you have to wonder exactly how much the HLP really benefitted by having the BBS in the first place. It was never, from the start, the New Book Lovefest they evidently hoped it would be. And after the bannings last August, it became a rather insipid joke.

For the record, by the way, no one has been giving Byron much of a hard time for the boards being down. The problem is obviously beyond his area of responsibilities and is squarely in that of the webmaster, Mike Anderson (yes, again, Kevin's uncle). A board being down a day or two is one thing; a week is another entirely. But this is the sort of ineptitude and mediocrity that people really should learn to associate with DUNE from now on. (Read a New Dune book lately?  ::) )

As for being patient and waiting, well, I guess when you measure site downtime in months, yeah, a week really isn't much to complain about, is it?  :D

[Andrew]

Compared to most other Dune websites a couple weeks of downtime isn't bad. Most go offline permanently :P

[Omphalos]

Compared to most other Dune websites a couple weeks of downtime isn't bad. Most go offline permanently :P

Most of those have very few users.  DN was moderately active. 

[Hypatia]

I've been part of other boards that had serious glitches that kept them offline for a couple of weeks. And yes, the membership went snaky and suffered withdrawal, as the downtime happened over Christmas/New Years' on one of them. Happily, when we got our forum back the hosts felt sufficiently guilty and embarrassed that they gave all the forums on that particular server extra storage space and a few other privileges to make up for the loss of service.

The other site, however... pfft. The admin there was an inept twit, and once we got back, we still had to chase down missing content. Some threads and articles ended up lost permanently, and the authors/readers were extremely displeased (as is natural in such situations). This is a huge reason why I archive so much content. The really good stuff is difficult to recreate from scratch.

I don't know what Byron/DN's situation is, but I'm just waiting patiently for it to come back, or some word that the situation has changed. I'd hoped that KJA's latest blog entry might say something (silly, I know)... but not a word was about Dune at all.

In the situations I described at the other forums that went down for extended periods, we did have the benefit of most of us having other forums in common so we were able to keep in touch. It always helps to have an alternate 'meeting place' in case of emergency. ;)

[Nekhrun]

I've also been waiting for a KJA response to the whole episode.  I thought he'd jump at the chance considering he could get some more sympathy from his myspace followers.

[Hypatia]

But how many of his MySpace fans are also DN members? I used to reply to his blog posts until somebody tipped him off to both my online identities...

[SandChigger]

Ah, the skunk has sprayed again since last I checked? Thanks for the pointer! Ret'su-ra blawg! ;D

(Of course he's not going to mention the board being down: his uncle is the one who most likely scrood da pooch. ::) And he obviously wasn't keeping proper backups, otherwise he could have completely reinstalled the software AND the database by now. And I know I'm not the only person who has idly wondered if there's not more behind this than simple ineptitude on the part of the webmaster. But yes, let's be patient and wait and see.... ;) )

[SandChigger]

Well, the OFFICIAL boards are back up and everybody seems happy happy happy again. ;D

And if what Byron has posted is accurate, the problem appears to have been faulty database management (not noticing that it was growing larger than the space allotted it) by the webmaster and was solved by the staff of the provider.

Duke Leto I had something to say about this sort of thing...hmmm, what was it again.... Oh yeah:

<b>"Damn sloppy way to operate."</b>