h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

12:50 2 January 2004

System crashed totally. I became Researcher 241325 again, and users logged on became zero.

What happened? Why does this happen from time to time?

Yes it does. It's not too regular an occurance, but when it happens it is annoying.

Things usually come back on stream pretty sharpish.

... only to crash again at 13:17

... and again at 14:32

Three times and its murder ...

Isn't that supposed to be: three times is enemy action. I'm also not sure whom you think you might murder. The hardware/software probably doesn't qualify and any owners/creators responsible for the problems are unlikely to declare themselves. You've already missed many earlier crashes anyway. We've gone well past 3 full ones just today - 2 fairly early, 1 just before 10am and 3 since noon.

Judging by the SSO fiasco, the system managers here are quite happy to go live with an untested bag of nails. Judging by the coming, going and now return of the new posting info on ones PS, they are quite happy to tinker with the system live, and unannounced.

As we have suddenly had several crashes today, I just wondered what they were doing, and whether they will own up to it.

As I tend to engage in producing entries, rather than participating in convos (although I do that as well), it is much more than annoying that after an hour or so editing, pressing the update button brings forth some service not available message.

It is also rather annoying that they make changes to the system which no-one asked for, and yet cry lack of resources when problems which are experienced by many users are pointed out time and time again. Why, for example, won't they fix the various problems with the search?

SSO *was* tested to some degree before going live. Some problems raised were *not* fixed though.

New posts on the MP list is one of Jim Lynn's little features. As original designer of the software, I think he is reserving the right to play with it. That one didn't seem to break anything else though. So it was mostly harmless.

They (Jim Lynn and various others behind the scenes) don't always know what causes the crashes. Sometimes they install new monitoring to try to find out. Sometimes that causes more problems! The loss of long posts or pages during a crash is indeed very annoying to many people. Those who can tend to work offline or take a copy before pressing the post/update button (especially during periods of frequent crashes).

The prioritising of fixes and features is probably largely going to remain a mystery. For a start, you don't know how many people behind the scenes have requested a new feature. The resources thing is also going to be determined by which internal sub-budget is involved. On top of that you may have people who don't want to do boring fixes when they can do new fun (to them) features. Some fixes/features may be harder to implement than you think. Also some user-requested features/fixes will be things they don't want us to have for various reasons.

The loss of one or two entries during the writing prompted me to start writing my entries in a text editor and then uploading it. Not only do I have a copy on my PC should the site crash, I can continue working if the site remains down. Notepad is fine and dandy, but these days I use MaW's GuidePost http://alledora.co.uk/guidepost/

Good plug, Gosho!

I try to plug GuidePost whenever I can

As soon as Felonious and the team get GuideDog A745887 finished, I'll do the same for that program too