WotC forums down for a week or two?

[dvorak]

After reading the comments it reminded me of.....

I told the Captain I would have this diagnostic done in an hour.
And how long will it really take you?
An hour!
Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would really take, did you?
Of course I did.
Oh, laddie, you have a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

Starship captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. The secret is to give them what they need, not what they want.

Looking forward to the new WoTC online community platform.

Ciao

 

[roguerouge]

I agree that they've allotted what seems like a very large amount of time for this, but they probably have their reasons. ... they don't have the staff, they don't want to work overtime ....

Extremely unusual delays are what happens when you cut staff and do new projects.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

Just for the record, right now the D&D main site has limited functionality for me (e.g. I can't login).

EDIT: The Compendium works fine though, no problems logging in there.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Respectfully, three points:

1) No snark was intended.

Cool... I apologise for reading too much into your responses.

2) It is not "a major company's website". It is only the discussion forums. The rest of the site is still up. They're still doing business, in general.

Splitting hairs here... it's a subsystem of the website.

3) Absolutes... aren't. "...no credible scenario..." is an absolute. While I will agree that if one has all the budget and resources one needs, there's no technical reason why downtime should have to happen. However, constraints of budget, resources, and time do happen. Especially in a subsystem that doesn't directly generate revenue. Business folks may find the second-order revenues of the system worth giving up for a while if it makes other things cheaper.

As with most of WotC's business decisions - we don't get to see the balance sheets, so our judgments are purely speculative.

Look, when I say there is something awry in WotC's IT department, I'm not trying to say that all of their coders and web designers are idiots. There could be a disproportionate number of inexperienced developers on the staff. The IT managers could be improperly prioritising tasks. Those in charge of the budget could be working with a budget that's too small, or they aren't spending the budget in the right places. Whatever the reason, there appears to me to be a systemic failure in the IT department at WotC.

Look at the failure of Gleemax, the length of time it took to get a search function on the forums, the one hour 'maintenance window' (since gone, thankfully) during which the forums were down every day. Put this together with this latest outage. You're right, absolutes aren't, but Ockham's Razor and all that.

I can understand this, and I appreciate you civility. It's Ulorian's hostility that provoked people, so I mean it when I say that I appreciate you keeping your opinion in perspective, gribble.

I wasn't trying to be hostile, and I'd question the blanket statement that I've 'provoked people'. Having said that, in retrospect, my comments were more abrupt than I like and Gribble has put forth what I was trying to convey in a much more eloquent and diplomatic way than I have.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Isn´t it sad that, even before i clicked on the thread, i knew that:
a) there would be experts calling the downtime anything from "unusual" to "a sing for lack of competence."
b) Shemeska would give a little "remember Gleemax?" speech?
c) We would get "it´s been worse in China" posts.

I spend too much time online.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Isn´t it sad that, even before i clicked on the thread, i knew that:
a) there would be experts calling the downtime anything from "unusual" to "a sing for lack of competence."
b) Shemeska would give a little "remember Gleemax?" speech?
c) We would get "it´s been worse in China" posts.

I spend too much time online.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.



Just kidding.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Isn´t it sad that, even before i clicked on the thread, i knew that:
a) there would be experts calling the downtime anything from "unusual" to "a sing for lack of competence."
b) Shemeska would give a little "remember Gleemax?" speech?
c) We would get "it´s been worse in China" posts.

I spend too much time online.

You forgot:

d) There would be at least one Smug Drive-by.

 

[Phaezen]

To be fair, if WOTC management feel the need to pull the forums down for a week for the rebuil/upgrade/moving to new system to give the technitions time to concentrate on the new system and not have to support an old system at the same time this can only be a good thing?

Right?

 

[avin]

A lot of the management responsible is gone, true. And Hasbro wouldn't let that happen again given the money sink it became.

I know that they've lost a lot of people from the DDI staff (they've got more managers than developers last I heard), however I'm not sure if the same people that would handle the forum upgrades are from the same pool of people that are doing the DDI (who are woefully understaffed because of layoffs, and the Hasbro hiring freeze's effect on numerous contract-to-hire people upon the end of their original term).

Well, after the Gleemax fiasco they have produced Character Builder and Monster Builder, products that I would love to have during 3.5 days.

I'll give them the benefit of doubt.

Mayve they get rid of 4vengers in ths process

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Seems to me that they do not have the budget (and possibly the hardware) to run a side by side implemtation and it seems to be affecting the main web site as i am getting nothing useful from it at the moment.
I get the logos and banners, the left menu strip and the inner menu buttons and no content or any option to login.
If I have deep a url that seems to work fine but the main page is non functional.

I wonder if the forums and website was all ran from one platform and the 2 weeks down time is to disentangle the forums from the site? The random breakages would seem to indicate that there was some linkage.