Hi, Any time I hear complaints or concerns, I take them seriously... sometimes we're already working on the issue (like we've been working on site speed for the last few months)... sometimes it's that we have to get better about how our products get released so I take that feedback to the team internally... sometimes it's a hardware issue that happens in the middle of the night (we need to speed up architectural changes)... sometimes the issues are 3rd party and we try to adapt as best we can... that can be a ddos attack, one of our various bandwidth providers having an issue or even one of our own wikis accidentally causing an outage.
I forwarded this thread to the entire technical team to remind everyone that as we are working on things or switching out servers that there is an audience that is getting effected every minute and we need to be more mindful of that. One thing Danny said that is definitely true... wikis and wiki people are a special breed. We know the dedication it takes to get a community going and our job is to help foster that as much as we can while also growing the site in other fundamental ways. The other side of that coin is that *everything* about this site tends to be dynamic. That, plus we enable a lot of extensions that various communities want (like DPL) that can cause additional load (this is why Wikipedia won't enable some of these extensions). So we also have a juggling act between site speed/stability and trying to satisfy a lot of the functionality requests that come in from the communities. It is better than last year... but we've been growing and the expectations that you the community have and that we have for ourselves have risen. For the past 6 weeks we have been moving a lot of equipment around while trying to optimize the site... and we have a lot more equipment coming in... so I apologize for the outages that happened as a result of that. I'll sit down with the team and discuss how we minimize this going forward. Thanks, John Q. Danny Horn wrote: > I think there can be a middle ground between Jamie's optimism and > Sebastian's frustration. > > I work on a bunch of wikis too, and, like Jamie, I'm very happy with > the progress that's been made in the last year. Sebastian, I don't > know how long you've been running your wiki, so you may or may not > have seen where things were a year and a half ago. The issues that > come up now are nothing compared to what it used to be; this is a much > smoother running site. > > At the same time, I think it's important to acknowledge the > frustration that some users feel about the tech issues. Sebastian > isn't imagining things; there have been outages of one kind or another > just about every week. > > Yes, Wikia is growing quickly, there are a lot of changes that are > being made technically, and there are always going to be glitches. > There's a good explanation for each problem, and problems get fixed. > But that doesn't change the users' experience, which has been a > regular series of outages and bugs. This is especially frustrating for > new users, who aren't comforted by the thought of how much better it > is compared to a year ago. > > Wiki people are a special breed; we put our heart and soul -- and a > whole lot of our spare time -- into building a site that we feel > passionate about. That's the kind of people that Wikia wants to > attract, and keep. So that means that when there are problems that > seem to threaten the stability of the wikis, then those passionate > people are going to get worried and upset. > > I think it's important for Wikia to figure out solutions for both > problems -- how to fix the tech issues, and also how to help the > passionate users know that their complaints are being addressed. If > Sebastian is feeling cynical and frustrated, then I'm sure he's not > alone. If we want to keep him around, then we need to listen to him, > and take his comments seriously. > > > -- Danny > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Wikia-l mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l > _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
