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I don't think that moving forum topics to the Romper Room is doing the members any justice. Although they are a little hot on fire but they are still serious topics talking about real issues that concerns the welfare of Blogdrive members. They don't deserve to be in the Romper Room because they are not ill-mannered or arguing for the sake of arguing.
Moving these topics away from the main branch (in this case Helpee's on Fire) is like China's media control policy. I think forum moderators should re-evaluate what they move away from the main branch. It feels like censorship to me. Please reconsider this and move them back to where they really belong.
From a topic in the forums, in responce to Klubbkidd's frustration and many other fellow bloggers: http://www.blogdrive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25338#25338
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I paid (for three years), I get kicked in the ass too.
Klubbkidd, I've been following your blog every now and then. I also know the volume of visitors you attract, I believe it's in the thousands per day category making it one of the most popular blogs on Blogdrive.
However, seeing that you are doing a serious business you should have left Blogdrive a long time ago. There are better service out there not to mention they are free too.
When BD announced that they are moving data centers, I crossed my fingers and hoped that this'll be the last time we'll be having any problems or discomfort. Till now, one month later it's just as it is before. Pointless.
I guess the only thing you'll lose when you switch, which would also be the most crucial part of it all, is your current blog address. That alone bring many other big disadvantages: Your permalinks and status that you've gathered up until today will all be lost, losing out in search engine rankings. And the complication with what your visitors are familiar with.
My advice to you is this: give BD one more chance, say two weeks. If this big moving of data center doesn't get better in two weeks, by all means, MOVE. Get outta Blogdrive, don't let your potential be hold back by some Californian startup. Flap your wings and fly.
I wonder why no one has requested this until now, Gloria proposed we create a wikipedia page for Blogdrive in the forums. With failed attempt.
So, I'm proposing a different approach. We'll have to show wikimods how important Blogdrive is to be included in the best online encyclopedia. In order to do that, we should do what we does best, blogging!
So people, start blogging for Blogdrive!
Tags: wikipedia, blogdrive,
As always, Michael make up good stories on his expriences working on Blogdrive. I'm afraid it might dissappear one day like the other stories so I decided to post it here too. You can head over to the forum and read them all there. This is also a n update of their progress in moving data centers.
(Short version)
I apologize for the down time we've been experiencing. Things are looking quite good now. After performing a system upgrade to power hardware on 8/26/06 we were faced with an unexpected challenge that caught us off guard. It took a while to identify the cause which is why it was difficult if not impossible to give an ETA to Blogdrive members during this time. We did attempt to place info on the home page; however this was not always viewable. Thank you for your patience. We will do our best to make certain this does not happen again.
(Long version)
The day the world went away
The events of 8/26/06 explained:
It was morning. Another sunny day here in Southern California, filled with magic and wonder. Nothing out of the norm. Little did we know tragedy was just around the corner for Blogdrive.
We were adding some hardware to the Blogdrive array of servers; line conditioners, rebooters, etc. We had to shut down all of Blogdrive to do this, which is not unusual as we shut down servers often to perform repairs and such. Shutting down and starting up servers is done in a specific sequence. We are schooled in this and did not anticipate any difficulties. However, after reboot something went terribly wrong.
Tim is our main server programmer. Besides being a great programmer he is also an awesome drummer (He insisted that I put the word "awesome" in there.) We have the servers setup to send Tim pages via his cell phone when they are in trouble. They were in trouble. Tim's cell phone sounded like an unstoppable mini Star Wars battle in his pocket.
The "data center" is where all the blogdrive servers are housed (there is also an outside backup location.) The data center occupies an entire floor of a very large building in Los Angeles. The security there is very tight. There are guards with monitors, a security desk, an area to place your entire hand for identification and several cards and keys to open doors and elevators. There are rows of racks and cages. It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running. Tim is often herd yelling "Speak up!" and "Why is everyjuan friggin' whispering on me?!"
Many of the Blogdrive servers are setup in a redundant array, each with multiple drives duplicating data and exchanging load and requests. This way if a drive fails or explodes or moves on to the next life, we can change it out for a new juan, re-sync it to the others and begin replicating data again. This means no data is lost and no down time experienced.
Needless to say when the pages started flooding in we all panicked; in a calm inward maintained programmer-like panic. All of the servers started shutting down and rebooting on there own in a crazy Ghost in the Machine kinda way. Tim with a link via computer tried to intervene and connect a minimum of resources to gain some control of the situation. They would not have it. I along with Jeff and Rick started pulling severs out of the cages and connecting them to other power sources. I held juan of them in my arms as it was convulsing. I looked over at the guys and screamed, "Is this how it ends? Is this how it ends?!" I set the dying server down and placed my hands to my head, slowing stepping back, then started screaming uncontrollably like a little girl. Or so they tell me.
It seemed there was nothing we could do to put an end to this madness. We checked everything; rebooters, switches, routers, etc. There was nothing. We then really started to panic, in a "what do you mean we're out of coffee?!" kinda panic. We pulled all the servers off line. Blogdrive went silent.
We brought many of the servers home with us to repair any damages that occurred to the data base, and or hardware. As I drove down the street I thought about all the servers I was carrying, the Blogdrivers and all their blogs, all their stories. I also thought about my driving skills, the fact that I was almost out of gas and had juan headlight out. Over the period of a few days we repaired damages and were able to put minimum systems online. We continued to work on the servers at my home. We slept when we could; me in my bedroom and Tim on the sofa, no funny business here. We assumed that we had experienced a strange power spike. We posted what we could to Blogdrive members. Although we did not have an eta, after much thought we knew we were close to an answer.
After further inspection of the servers, Tim felt the answer must be in the power source; something fluctuating in power, something undetected by the other equipment. It was juan of the most improbable possibilities. It would mean that the actual power source coming to the Blogdrive cages in the data center was at fault. This is like blaming a wall outlet. Very unlikely.
We brought the servers back to the data center. With new meters we tested the power source to the cages. It was true! There were severe power fluctuations in the line. It apparently caused damage to the equipment used to protect us from such things. Quickly we re-routed the power to a clean source. We mounted the servers and began syncing them. They were very happy. Blogdrive went back online with full functionality in the early hours of 8/30/06. It will take a week or so to get everything completely up to snuff, but this should not show much influence on the system.
I'd like to apologize to anyjuan affected by this challenge. We had never experienced such an outage before. We will do our best to keep such events from ever happening again.
I'd like to thank the following people:
Veronica over at Fry's Electronics - You got it going on baby!
The folks at Dunken Doughnuts – Remember, it's all about the Maple Bars.
Tracy at the security desk – Thanks for locking me out twice!
My girlfriend Erin who said – "Did you know there's a guy sleeping on our sofa"
I'd also like to thank all the Modulators including JFZ, Ang, Anthony and Sinj for their support. You guys rock me!
Btw,
During the wee hours of the morning at the data center I saw ghosts roaming through the various server cages and hallways. I tried to track them down, you know, to speak with them, but they kept disappearing. They seemed to be dancing at times, wearing nice clothing and such. I was tired. Sounds like a Made For TV movie to me.
Michael
Blogdrive
The Cool Blogdrive Guy (one of the two Blogdrive admin) speaks in responce to a member's complain in the forum. Read the complain first.
Blogdrive has tortured me enough. I've been a customer for one year and I'm actively looking for other options. This is the third unannounced outage and unresponded to help tickets in less than 2 weeks. Even when it's "working" it takes over an hour to make one post due to crashes. I've had the patience of a saint, hoping and praying. Yet, Blogdrive appears to be flatlining. I've simply had enough. I'm not going to waste my time even commenting much more. It's time to get serious and find a host that is ready for prime time and living in the real world. I feel foolish for even giving my business to this company. Maybe, instead of Yahoo buying Blogdrive, we should see if Toys R Us would be willing to take over. Or maybe the Salvation Army. Message to Helpee: I get the sense that you're trying to help, that you want to help, but that you just can't help. People need a blog host to have things that work and it's simply not working. It's very sad, but it is just not working. It's not. If I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, that would be lovely. But, all I see are the pleas of my fellow members virtually begging for improvements to the pathetic levels of outages. Is everyone familiar with the oft-quoted definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That's really what staying on as a Blogdrive customer equals: insanity.
And here is his reply:
Hi Rich, I feel your pain. Any unexpected outages have been just that, unexpected. Earlier today there was a flood attack on the servers. The unusually high utilization caused a database error which propagated to the other servers. It took some time to correct it across all the servers, but all is well now with no data loss. We are now looking at implementing new measures to help protect against this type of scenario.
Most of the other "outages" you experienced before are do to spammers or spiders causing DOS attacks. We have been in the process of both a data center move and network overhaul to better supply us with the network capability and bandwidth necessary to handle these situations better. unfortunately do to the scale of both projects it is taking some time to complete.
I can't say it says a lot, but it certainly keeps the member's mouth shut for the moment. Let's see for how long.
Reference: Forum,
Tags: blogdrive, customer service
As everyone can tell, the downtime for our favourite blog host has just occured. Cause of downtime is of course unknown, it's top secret (Blogdrive will have to kill you(in secret) if you figure it out the secret, it's bad for publicity)
There has been a HUGE, I mean it HUGE voice of anger in the Blogdrive forum. And not a single response from Blogdrive themselves.
The frequency of downtime is occuring more and more frequent compared to a few years back. Here are some of the most popular reasons given by Blogdrive whenever there's a down time:
1) Hurricane, this is an annual event and it doesn't just occur once a year but several. Whenever lighting strike, when the storms are strong, one of the internet router will *boom* and so there goes the 30,000 other Blogdrive blogs. This is far worst than a woman's PMS.
2) Upgrading server (or software), I'm not sure what its updating really. Whenever it say upgrading server, I hardly ever see any new features that comes with it either. Well, maybe sometimes (like the comment spam protection) although the down time could be of entirely different reason.
3) DoS attacks. Oooh... I absolutely hate it when these hackers have nothing better to do and choose to launch an attack on Blogdrive. Come on, why would anybody want to harm Blogdrive, there's 30 thousand innocent souls at stake. Say no to War on Iraq!
4) Spammer steals bandwidth. Yeah, these dirty bastard who are trying to make a quick buck on pharmaceutical products and pornography "steal" bandwidth. How? Erm... I don't know... I just know that it caused down time here on Blogdrive. (oh, really?)
5) Seige's Fault. It's all my fault. I didn't meant it. I didn't want anybody to get hurt but because the toilet isn't working I had to find an alternative target to satisfy my "nature calls". All this downtime is caused by waiting for the server drying up and for the toilet pump to be fixed. Disaster eh?
(In case you haven't realise, number five is totally made up and I've never actually seen the server before. Accept for a sexy picture of it here.)
Oh, and don't ask me why on earth update.blogdrive.com wasn't updated with any news about the downtime. All I know is that if you found out why Blogdrive was down, you'd better watch out because you might be murdered in a tragic death where all your body parts are broken into pieces and thrown into the river with no trace at all.
What was I on again? Right, WHY wasn't update.blogdrive.com UPDATED?
Tags: blogdrive, server, forum, downtime,
There was a topic in the forum devoted to reporting the status of Blogdrive not too long ago (one month to be exact). But after a short while it disappeared. I wasn't sure why the admin removed it but I do know that people aren't happy that it was taken down.
I do know that people are happy when they can be informed of the status of Blogdrive when they find something not working well with their blog. At least some kinda note or message that give them a bit of relief of some sort.
The forum, used to be filled with angry voices whenever a technical problem arises have been the one of the destination that people go to for advices. The other is the main tagboard, of course.
Now, let us put our hands together and give around of applause to the official Blogdrive update:
Let's hope it gets updated regularly. (not too regular, we don't want bad news, do we?) Reference: Blogdrive Update Forum, Tags: Blogdrive, Update, Server, Status,
A few months ago, or rather one year ago we were seeing the quick boom of online social networking websites. First there was friendster, or some other companies like myspace, zorpia, hi5, ringo, facebook, bebo and many many others, I'm not even sure which one appear first but they all just sprung out of no where trying make their mark in the boom.
As far as I know, Friendster and Myspace are among the most popular social networking websites available. It is estimated that friendster may have over one billion users account, while Myspace claims they serve up to 10% of the entire internet's advertising. That's one very brave and bold statement to make.
In the past (in the web 1.0 period), there were different types of online community websites. They are mainly separated into several types: Blogs platforms, Social Networking, photo sharing/hostings, Music Sites, Forums. As each of these website develops, they started to attempt to synchronise each of these different types of websites into themselves. In the hope of gathering more users.
One of the very first social networking that did this was Zorpia, where many of it's ideas came from developing a photo sharing community, and Xanga (a journal type website) and social networking (friendster based). Not long after the idea became realise as a brilliant way of providing more features to their users and extending their userbase, Friendster acquired typepad (blog software) as their default bloggint tool. Myspace choose to develop their own blogging feature as well.
These are the big giants in the pioneering business of the new way of life.
The bigger giants started to jump in the bandwagon, Google acquired BlogSpot, Yahoo did 360 and MSN did MSN Spaces.
So what we'll be expecting to see in the very near future is a portal based on a combination of these:
Blogs + Social Networking + Photo/Music/Video sharing + Instant Messenger + Forums.
Of course, the giants that have the bigger advantage over other companies in the long run due to their wide IM userbase, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. BLOGDRIVEIn the way the direction of internet business is going, it makes sense that BD will probably be introducing more features to satisfy their users needs. Such as music hosting, video, networking, personal profiles and many more. It has been revealed, somewhat that videos are coming out? And that they are researching on Myspace, going into networking kinda thing. We'll be expecting to see new features on Blogdrive. How soon I don't know but I'm excited to see the new features. Hopefully we'll get to see some Personal Messaging thingy too. Read about Hungry Media Companies find a Media Menu for websites to buy. Next entry: How Friendster succeed in their business model and why? Tags: blogdrive
Someone in the forum has fallen victim to the responsiveness of trouble tickets. How in the heck do I get my money back? There's no cancel option anywhere. I've submitted 3 support tickets. I've called. Still, no one has contacted me and my account still shows that my upgrade is good through next year. How long does it take someone to get around to support tickets? I'm not sure if he/she has received a responce, but seeing that there's no further discussion on the thread would mean that the issue have been resolved. Usually, it's easier to get the admin's attention if it's brought to the forums. There are volunteery mods there who are keeping an eye on things and they get direct contact with the admins. (note: tips) References: Plain Text Editor bugs, BlogDrive Disaster, Never Expect Replies from BlogDrive Trouble Ticket, BlogDrive Forum, How To Get A Reply From Blogdrive, Tags: BlogDrive, Support Ticket, Trouble Ticket, Customer Services, Forum,
Helpee have created a forum topic to report on what's going on behind the scene. This is an applausible action because now we'll know why we are experiencing difficulties accessing webblogs. At least we know it's not a problem with our own computer (a relief). http://www.blogdrive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3137 I'm certainly happy to see that despite a sudden influx of spam to my blog (which is ten fold) basically because BlogDrive is now beginning to communicate with their users in a more formal way. Keep up the good work! Currently, it's reporting the status of the technical problems with the server. It's been stickified and locked from posting by normal users. I certainly hope it'll be regularly updated with the ongoings behind the scenes. This benefits the users as well as Blogdrive. Oh, btw I hate spam. Sigh. *Updates: They have removed the forum topic and started a brand new blog for it. Read them here.
References: Blogdrive Update,
Tags: BlogDrive, Forum, Spam,
Continuing on my previous entry I'm going to tell you the best way to get a responce. But there's no guarantee because it's still up to BlogDrive admin to do it.
Common Sense
Many many trouble tickets are being send in by a large amount of BD users, hence it's obviously a lot of work for the admin to look at and then reply. To make things easier for them, some simple measures can be taken.
Before you send in a question, make sure you check if somebody have already asked the same issue in the forum. This would help avoid you from appearing stupid.
Make your message short and simple with proper English. If you were to write a whole long piece of nonsense and not addressing the main issue, your message would probably be deleted even before reading.
A little common sense goes a long way.
Having done all the above but still not getting a reply. It'll be time to blame BD for poor customer service instead of youself.
References: Never Expect Replies from BlogDrive Trouble Ticket, BlogDrive Forum,
Tags: BlogDrive, Customer Services, Forum,
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