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

Not sure if I'm just being grumpy here - and I know, before I get jumped on, that the site is now being run by volunteers, but nobody seems to be talking about this at all...

Here goes...

This site is as flaky as hell!!!!

Sorry guys, I know you're doing your best, but it's becoming all too common to visit the site and either it's not available, it's hellishly slow to load a page or it's impossible to log in...

I really am sorry - I know the site is being run on a shoestring and on the goodwill of a lot of people... But the question I have to ask is...

How long can it survive like this?
It _must_ be driving new users away from us...

To be fair to Patsey and the others, the site was pretty flaky under the BBC, certainly towards the end of their tenure. In terms of downtime, I've found it reasonable under the new regime, all things considered. They went through a complete site migration, of course. They won't have resources to invest in best practice high availability management on the ageing software platform, so they're concentrating all their resource {singular} on building the new one.

Tricky, isn't it. It's a big problem, but we can only make do with the resources we have, who are all working more than hard enough already...

sprout

I'm not sure how much I can say about this but I can tell you that Pastey is currently doing a load of code rewritng. He curses a lot about the current code and he works hard. I'm no programmer myself so I can't tell you what will be fixed now and what later and such, but I know there's a lot of work going on.

Flakey?!!

Whiskey, you should see how much we're still having to do behind the scenes purely to keep it at the "flakey" level

There's quite a few of my postings around the site about the sort of technology we're running on and with so I won't bore you, but you'll have to believe me when I say that keeping the site at flakey is pretty blooming impressive considering

In short though, messed up database, antique code, hacks and patches and single developer doing it in my spare time. Although you've heard that before

Now for the good news...

We've been working on making Pliny a lot more polished and usable. I think I'm about half way through getting a new release ready to come out, hoping that the next incarnation will be ready for testing in about a month or so, but seeing as it is just in my spare time, that may well end up being a bit longer.

If there's any particular bugs, do let Milla know so she can make sure it's logged and addressed

It's a damn sight less 'flaky' than it was during the last days of Auntie's reign, in my opinion!

Thank you Mr.D, I try my best

But it is still flakey, Whisky's right. Hopefully though the next release will make it at least look less flakey, amongst other things

And to answer Whisky's final point:

There isn't an elephant in the room. It drifted off a couple of months ago as the site was so flaky

Was there a monkey on it's back?

I think it had a cross to bear.

Yeah, and a bee in its bonnet.

And a flea in its ear.

No elephants but plenty of 's

Quite apt really as its a task that's being undertaken behind the scenes.

I'd just like to say I'm baffled by the existence of this thread, because I've had absolutely no problems whatsoever.

That said, I exclusively view the site in Brunel. Does this help? I don't know. All I know is - it always works, in my limited experience.

This

Of the older skins, Brunel is actually the most stable as it was the last one to be developed, and is also likely to be the last one to be migrated to the new platform. However, that does also mean that it'll be the last one to get the new goodies we're trying to get working.

I agree with Hoo. (I *knew* I'd have the chance to say that if I stuck around long enough).

I mostly agree with Hoovooloo. I've encountered some problems, but they were never big ones, and not very often. [Knocks wood.]

I'm mainly using alabaster in ripley with occasional forays into the new pliney doobry, when time permits, and I've not seen any error messages except for the one about changing the oil filters, for months...

Looks more like a to me as well, rather than an elephant.... though I do fear for the with either on site