Why is this site DOWN so often??
GBA Editor
| Posted in General Questions on
Seems like almost a daily occurrence lately.
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Replies
David,
I share your frustration. GBA has been working with programmers to improve our site, but we have encountered several glitches as these improvements are implemented. Needless to say, tracking down and correcting these software glitches is as frustrating for us as it is for you. As soon as we hear of these problems, we assign our tech staff to work on a solution.
We strive to have a Web site that performs well, and we appreciate your feedback. Any GBA readers who encounter problems with their access to the Web site can contact me directly:
martin [at] greenbuildingadvisor [dot] com
Thanks for your patience as we work through these glitches.
Ok, so it isn't just me then.
While we're at it...
Martin,
I've noticed that the number of comments listed for a particular blog or Q&A post doesn't always match what you find if you actually open up that blog or Q&A post...
For example, a particular "question" might show "5 ANSWERS" but when you click on that "question" and scroll down there are only four "answers" listed.
Just something I've noticed...
Lucas,
Sometimes people posting comments accidentally click twice when posting. This results in a double post -- the same comment appears twice. When this happens, I delete the duplicate post. The net result is the numbering discrepancy that you described.
I'm glad somebody asked this question. The site is virtually always down on Saturday and/or Sunday. This Sunday everything was M.I.A., the blogs, the product directory, etc.
After 4 days of pestering the customer service email address, I finally got my saved project back. I was a little worried that I was going to have to cull through all the articles again to restore the 20 or so I have saved. I'm not sure you really want to offer up your email address, Martin! I'll be emailing you next time...
Jeff,
On behalf of the GBA team, I'd like to apologize to you for your recent problems accessing our site. Feel free to e-mail me any time, and I'll do my best to try to help you in the future.
Apology accepted! And I will...
We are sorry for the inconvenience. GBA has been humming along not causing any trouble until we decided to make it a little better. What we realized when we began 'improving' it is that there are updates available for the version of drupal that we built GBA on, and some of the updates we were trying to implement didn't communicate well with the version of drupal we are running.
One casualty of this process is that something causes the 'permissions' of each user to get disjointed -- usually it is a problem for people who are not signed in, sometimes it is a problem for GBA PROs.
We are often unaware of the problem because to administrators, the site looks fine (in order to do our jobs, we are typically signed in with our administrative 'permissions').
Updating all of the back end means a lot of QA testing by a lot of people who have been working on other projects. I just got word from IT that we are going to begin updating drupal and testing on a development site next week. I am not sure how long it will take. As soon as we are sure the drupal upgrades are stable with all of the modules in GBA we will push the updates to the live site.
We will keep you all informed on progress, and may enlist the help of some of you in checking for bugs.
There was also a separate issue recently. We (Taunton Press) recently updated our version of eRights, the customer management software. Everything on all of the sites went fine except at GBA about 1% of the user accounts had duplicates created which caused trouble for these folks when logging in. We have been fixing the list of duplicates and should have it finished today. Two of the duplicates were people on our advisory team, Carl Seville and Allison Bailes.
Martin has a pretty heavy editorial workload and I just heaped more work on him, please contact me with your site-related problems, not him.
dmorrison(at)taunton[dot]com
Again, sorry for the hassle, and thanks for your support.
Dan
Down all weekend, starting about the time you folks left the office on Friday....
This same thing has happened before. Someone must be unplugging something when they leave.
David,
I'm deeply sorry, and I apologize to you and all of our GBA readers. I can assure you that it's just as frustrating for me as it is for you. And as far as we can tell, no one is pulling the plug when they go home on Friday. Our tech team is still searching for this elusive software glitch.
Martin, the glitch seems to occur more often when you are "off duty"....
just wondering if there is a correlation?
how does the webmeister usually get the website to come back online?....
or does it just "happen"?
John,
We have developed a series of tricks to bring the web site back. However, that doesn't mean we understand why it goes down.
Of course, if GBA editors notice a problem over the weekend, there is more of a chance that we'll be able to fix it. I was traveling this weekend and unable to attend to the problem, unfortunately.
I was traveling over the weekend too, and so was Rob. That's why none of us were able to fix anything.
what triggers the crash?
I have never noticed it crashing during business hours....
or is it crashing randomly all the time...and you guys are
constantly doing your series of tricks?
John,
We are not sure exactly what triggers the crashes.
We began 'improving' some features of GBA a few months ago. When some of the changes were pushed live from the development servers to the production servers, GBA began experiencing random problems.
The problems didn't occur on the development servers, only on the production server. One thing we noticed is that the live site is running a version of Drupal that is a couple of years out of date. The folks doing the work didn't want to do any further work until GBA's platform is up to date.
Because a lot of GBA's parts are custom modules, they each need to be tested with the updated version of Drupal.
We are currently updating Drupal on the development servers and will begin QA testing on all of the modules. When we are confident that everything is stable, we will push the changes live. After that, we will get back to our merry work of making the site better.
Usually when GBA crashes, one of us can fix it quickly because Martin begins work early in the morning and I generally work until late at night. It is the time between about 10:30 or 11 pm and 5:30 or 6 am that it is unchaperoned.
These past couple of weekends, both of us spent personal time with our families; so neither of us were available to fix the foul-up.
Again, we are very sorry for the inconvenience, ask for your patience, and thank you for your support.
Dan
Crazy right now if not signed in for sure. The site is entirely different.
Also... Spam filters... why does the filter go off for someone who has posted for long enough to have it be less sensitive. I have no clue why it goes off most of the time.
Jack
I can alter your profile to bypass the spam filter. We need to keep it in place to stop the spam machine, but we can bypass it for trusted users.
I'll do it in a few minutes.
If anyone else is having trouble with it, let me know.
Dan
Dan, you are... the man. I had an idea that "poster tweaking" could be on some kind of basis. Thank you for the trust coming my way and I will do my best to be a non spammer if I understand what spam is. May have to buy some spam now that I have typed spam so many times today.
Just a heads up! Over the last week or two, this site has been down (it's there but has no content) about 25-35% of the time I've tried to access it. Sometimes for hours at a time. No apologies needed, I know these things are complicated and everybody's working hard, but I've never experienced such a major website that is so unreliable! I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't such an excellent site! Just as I've become hopelessly addicted to the wealth of information here, it's consistently unavailable. Please stop teasing me, GBA.
Michael,
Thanks for your latest comment. Please let me know personally whenever the site is down: martin [at] greeenbuildingadvisor [dot] com.
This situation has gone from frustrating to unacceptable. Unfortunately, it's not my job to fix it; but it is my job to help any GBA readers who are having problems, to the best of my ability. I sincerely hope that the tech department comes up with a solution soon, or we are all going to lose our minds.
Thanks for your loyalty. Keep sending me e-mails. I'll continue to do my best to help.
Not sure how Google Add revenue works ... but it seems to me that several hours down per week might add up on a high traffic website.
Seems like GBA/Taunton could afford to pay an intern when Martin is "Off Duty"?
Geez, Martin deserves some time off.