Agreed. Companies have cut so much these days that the "production" environment has become the test bed. At our company we never allow anything on our production web that has not gone through our dev/test bed thoroughly and we can always roll back quickly when needed. We follow a solid Change Management policy. I had basically stated earlier that knowing the business relationship is required because we don't have the info we need to make good assessments about the issues on RCU, but any of us involved in IT have probabley tasted this sort of thing.

Another thing to consider is that some pieces/parts of the site might take a tad more horsepower, however the chat type forums usually are the easiest to run, requiring the least amount of juice from the server side because they mostly deal with text and picture uploads/downloads. Chat forums are about the service level of connectivity. It is not like we are logging in running web apps which do require some serious back end. The problems I have noticed seems like basic service issues for the most part.

On RCU I have ran into problems with object resizing, time outs, and general connection problems. Object resizing usually deals with sloppy code or not defining the exact issue, and timeouts and connection problems deal with service reliability. From the end user standpoint what we see is the same that we saw with the old service, just much worse now since the upgrade which is not a good thing for an upgrade. Normally one basic reason for upgrading is better realiability.

RCU is a great group of RC folks and I have learned much and enjoy the site immensely. I do think that these issues should not have gone on as long as they have. The IT folks may be shooting a line of you-know-what to the powers that be instead of diving in and getting the issues resolved. I hope the RCU management can get these things ironed out...such a great RC outlet!