That is all.
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For now.
Paizo, seriously. Your site was down for a week. In the early stages of a vitally important playtest.
Down time like that costs you revenue, tarnishes your brand and erodes your relationship with your customers. You have got to get a handle on the reliability issues. They pose a very real threat to the viability of your business.
I'm sure they're happy to have such wonderful analysis of the situation from forum-goers on how a primarily web-based store works since they've been running one for over 15 years using this same custom-built software solution.
I also imagine that under the hood there are a lot of things that needed optimized and fixed after extreme strain on their website from the playtest. I'd guess they took this week to do some emergency code updates or possibly moved the website to larger/cloud hardware in order to meet the needs. Perhaps even both. Not that this has been a recurring problem for quite some time with slowdowns happening during major sales throughout the year.
But, until your post, I'm sure that none of those points occurred to them at all. Thank you for your service to the greater community.
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Eh. I personally don't think there's any issue with emphasizing how badly this reflects on the company as long as there's no personal attacks or crudity of course. Committed fans being driven to comment are indicators of far more casual fans or potential new customers who will throw up their hands and leave with a bad taste in their mouths.
Seriously though it seems like the website is built on technology that is decommissioned and no longer being very actively maintained. That's not great for either troubleshooting issues, or for hiring people to work on it.
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Seriously though it seems like the website is built on technology that is decommissioned and no longer being very actively maintained. That's not great for either troubleshooting issues, or for hiring people to work on it.
The website is custom-built. Partially because of how things are interconnected via forums/product-pages/blogs/pfs-reporting/etc. It is actively maintained by their internal IT staff which is constantly writing updates for the website and working on additional projects which may/may-not see the light of day or are behind-the-scenes interactions with their partners like Roll20 and HeroLab/RealmWorks.
The main problem is that the system is very old and while there are a lot of things that have been replaced and other pieces tacked on, it is still an incredibly large, proprietary piece of software which helps run their entire business.
They know what they're doing, but there is over a decade of legacy code interaction that needs to be taken into consideration whenever they make any changes. Plus, occasional distractions like adding features to work with Humble-Bundle, PaizoCon, Kickstarters, etc.
However, it is actively maintained. They recently had to add features dealing with legislation that went down in the EU which also takes away from their focus on fixing/updating other things.
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@ Gregg Reece: I don't think anyone is arguing that the task of maintaining the old Frankenstein code behind the scenes isn't difficult. Said difficulty does not diminish the severity of this last week's epic server meltdown.
Eh. I personally don't think there's any issue with emphasizing how badly this reflects on the company as long as there's no personal attacks or crudity of course. Committed fans being driven to comment are indicators of far more casual fans or potential new customers who will throw up their hands and leave with a bad taste in their mouths.
This is spot on my feelings on the matter! I'm a huge fan and supporter of Paizo and hope for their continued success. That is why this meltdown is equally disappointing. It was painful to be locked out of the messageboards for 4 days, then see the maintenance splash page for another 3.
I have no doubt the hardworking Paizo staff are also frustrated and disappointed.
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Paizo, thank you for getting the site back up. I can't imagine how stressful this week was for you. For me, it was quite frustrating but ultimately a minor inconvenience. If the worst thing happening in my life is that my favorite pretendy funtimes forum went down for a few days, my life is pretty f@%#ing good.
And I'm sure people pointing out the very obvious unfortunate business-loss implications of the crash while pretending to be "constructive" whilst in reality meanspiritedly rubbing salt in your wounds telling you things you already know in order to "punish" you beyond what you've already been through isn't making it any better. It's hilarious, we finally are able to post again, and all a number of folks are doing with the ability to post is b~#%* about being unable to post.
I trust repairs and analysis is ongoing, and if a public postmortem is warranted, you'll post it when you're damn good and ready. I hope this happening fairly early in this 6 month long play test means we'll have much smoother sailing from here. I do not care what the self-entitled and meanspirited think of you (or me). Thanks for your ongoing hard work.
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I do not think of myself as either self-entitled or meanspirited and I do not think that anything I have said has been rubbing salt in anyone's wounds.
:)
Is it staying up this time?
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Paizo, thank you for getting the site back up. I can't imagine how stressful this week was for you. For me, it was quite frustrating but ultimately a minor inconvenience. If the worst thing happening in my life is that my favorite pretendy funtimes forum went down for a few days, my life is pretty f!*$ing good.
And I'm sure people pointing out the very obvious unfortunate business-loss implications of the crash while pretending to be "constructive" whilst in reality meanspiritedly rubbing salt in your wounds telling you things you already know in order to "punish" you beyond what you've already been through isn't making it any better. It's hilarious, we finally are able to post again, and all a number of folks are doing with the ability to post is b&~&% about being unable to post.
I trust repairs and analysis is ongoing, and if a public postmortem is warranted, you'll post it when you're damn good and ready. I hope this happening fairly early in this 6 month long play test means we'll have much smoother sailing from here. I do not care what the self-entitled and meanspirited think of you (or me). Thanks for your ongoing hard work.
While I don't doubt Paizo know how they feel about a sustained outage, I don't think they're in the business of telling their customers not to express disappointment, irritation or inconvenience as a result, either (so long, as Azih says, it's not profane, etc).
I don't know why the outage happened, but I know a lot of us here also code or run a variety of complex systems (including legacy systems) with uptime requirements and are entitled to professional opinions at the level of consumer even without knowing the exact cause (which Paizo can keep to themselves, of course; many companies don't broadcast the reason for IT failures). Non-professional consumers are also entirely entitled to their opinions, as well. It doesn't have to be "meanspirited" to offer those opinions expressing displeasure, and I didn't read anyone saying it was the "worst thing happening in my life", either, or other significant over-reaction.
For me, it was only really inconvenient and a little embarrassing; I was trying to get a new player into our playtest group and it looked a bit crummy that the site was down for so long (that person is in the computing business, actually, but it'd have been a bit painful whatever they did). If I were using the forums for a PBP game, or wanted some rules advice, etc, or was trying to order something from the webstore, then it would have been more irritating and might encourage me to go somewhere else with more stability, I guess, and those would be legitimate decisions to make, and to explain why.
Customer Service & Community Manager
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My recommendation would be to copy/paste posts into a text editor or something before clicking the submit post, especially for longer posts. I think things are stabilizing, but it might be a bit of a bumpy ride for a bit (think turbulence warnings from your pilot. We don't expect anymore wild drops in altitude, but buckle your seat belts and leave your tray tables and seat backs upright and locked just in case).
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I think that "need to be said" is an unusually high bar to set before posting on an elfgame forum...But not for communication in general.
I think conversations would be pretty stilted if people only said what they thought was needed; it's not a very natural way to converse.
Telecons and work meetings, on the other hand, could often do with better filters to make them shorter (but then, we don't have any choice about being in those). Also speeches at weddings.
I wonder whether the outage was to deny access to somebody who had figured out how to hack in. Better dead than red . . . (and if that is really what happened, I wouldn't expect Paizo to confirm it until they were REAL SURE they fixed it).
I wonder whether the outage was to deny access to somebody who had figured out how to hack in. Better dead than red . . . (and if that is really what happened, I wouldn't expect Paizo to confirm it until they were REAL SURE they fixed it).
Inevitably when the website crashes it occurs to me that I've just tried to dodgy something up with my orders by exploiting some loophole I figure the coders wouldn't have thought of. Perhaps my paranoia is warranted...
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Hell, I'm just glad it's working again... hope everyone involved is getting some friggin' rest, 'cause clearly, the week preceding this wasn't an easy time for the tech-heads.
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My recommendation would be to copy/paste posts into a text editor or something before clicking the submit post, especially for longer posts. I think things are stabilizing, but it might be a bit of a bumpy ride for a bit (think turbulence warnings from your pilot. We don't expect anymore wild drops in altitude, but buckle your seat belts and leave your tray tables and seat backs upright and locked just in case).
Not sure if this is occurring for everyone, but while I can hit the Pathfinder side of the site/store, I can't get to the Starfinder products.
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My recommendation would be to copy/paste posts into a text editor or something before clicking the submit post, especially for longer posts. I think things are stabilizing, but it might be a bit of a bumpy ride for a bit (think turbulence warnings from your pilot. We don't expect anymore wild drops in altitude, but buckle your seat belts and leave your tray tables and seat backs upright and locked just in case).Not sure if this is occurring for everyone, but while I can hit the Pathfinder side of the site/store, I can't get to the Starfinder products.
If I use the Starfinder option of the frontpage I get into an endless webobjects signin loop.
Using the Store -> Starfinder option I have no issues to get to the Starfinder content. Maybe that works for you too?
If I use the Starfinder option of the frontpage I get into an endless webobjects signin loop.
Using the Store -> Starfinder option I have no issues to get to the Starfinder content. Maybe that works for you too?
Thank you! The sign-in loop is the problem that I was experiencing. Your alternate path got me to the products, however. Thanks. AtAT part 1 is now mine. :)
I'm gad it's back now. A couple nights ago the whole frickin internet went down, but was up again in the morning. People downloading your playtest broke the internet. Congratulations.
Some of this must have been intentional. The off topic forum seems to have been moved. I'll try to find it again. The new look is great, and it seems to load faster.
The off topic forum seems to have been moved. I'll try to find it again. The new look is great, and it seems to load faster.
Did you want the Gamer Life forum or the Off Topic subforum?