Can't seem to get in to where one would manage their forums. I keep getting the same error message. this has been going on like this for some time now, Am I alone in this?

Nope, It also happens when I go to some threads.

Indeed it is happening for several weeks now and getting worse, the entire board is becoming almost unusable.

John

When RCU changed hands last year there was a major software snafu. The original software was so badly bandaged together that the new servers just went haywire. The major problems have been fixed, but IB is constantly trying to fix the smaller problems.

Anyone who works with software knows that many time when you fix one thing, something else pops up. That is what you are seeing when the pages load slowly or you get a 500 error - So they undo whatever they did and try something else.

Have faith, they will get it right eventually.

Eventually??

wow...I've never been one to complain... as I get what I pay...

but man,... the threads have really become unusable.......

I work in the business. I understand completely. Like was said, you get what you paid for. It will have to get a lot worse before I bail.
Edwin

Yes I kept getting socket server errors yesterday. I figured the moderators were aware of it, so I didn't harrass any of them in the PM.

Even with the growing pains of having a new server- still RCU is the best.



Pete

You got that right

I sure hope your right BUT according to my Son, I'm older than dirt & rocks so I hope I live long enough to see it!

It is and has been a pain in the butt however it isn't the first time there have been site problems. There for a while I thought they had finally gotten it taken care of. Wrong. Knowing zip about computers or programming I haven't a clue what can be done about it? Close down the site and start over from scratch? It is what it is and sooner or later I'm sure they will get it fixed. OK, not too sure but I do hope!

Starting from scratch is actually what was originally intended. I've heard through the grapevine that IB also owns v_bulletin, which is the forum software that RCU used back in the original days (Remember the blue logo?) and that IB's plan was to switch it back someday. So hopefully they are working on a new, scratch version

Does "starting for scratch" mean that all of the existing threads and posts would be lost? That would be a shame because I've composed a few Pulitzer Prize-quality posts over the years!

Harvey








(Okay, they're more like Mad Magazine-quality!)

If they did loose all the old posts it could be fun starting over. Just getting rid of the What Size Prop question would be more fun. Maybe training people to use the search engine to look up basic questions. Just think of the room that could be ssaved by loosing the ARF VS Kit question. Sometimes a fresh start is a good thing.

Well, in my biased opinion the quality of these forums are tied to the speed and stability of the serving platform. I have been closing stalled browsing sessions more often in the recent past and am considering abandoning RCU as a resource due to this. I know I get what I pay for, but the adds pushed into our faces, including the new pop-ups, should be enough to foot the bill.

For scale building and large scale aerobatics other sites have RCU beat hands down. This was not always so.

Time will tell if RCU will stay around.

Bliksem

I would be curious to what type of service they went to or was it just hosting on another server farm. Since it was changed there certainly have been quite a few issues. Often times poor service is blamed on "bugs." I work in the IT field and have for many years and we see the "blame" game going on all the time. I work with many new technologies and this is characteristical of the new "cloud" services platform as it is full of bugs and needs some serious ironing out.

By the way the "cloud" is nothing new, just different icing on the cake. If they went to a cloud service type platform that would certainly be understood as cloud services have given poor service without a robust back end which is quite costly. In some cases in the millions can be spent which makes the old type setups still attractive. Sometimes the new is not better than the old. It just has a "spin" on it to get you to dive in.

I enjoy RCU and hope things get turned around because the service has degraded immensely since the upgrade/change some time back. I have learned so much from fellow RCers in my trek with RC. If our IT company had of allowed this type of service to our customers we would have been let go of our contract and someone else would be handling it! Hard to comment much as we don't know the business and service level agreement RCU and has with the service provider.

Hopefully someone with some skills will "nail" the so-called bugs after they stop the blame game [X(] [X(] [X(]

There are many RC sites and I have never limited myself to just RCU. It just depends on what I am building at the time and what type of help I require. When I have questions about anything with electric power I jump right over to wattflyer. If I'm doing a scale plane and require info I go to scale builders. There is a lot of great info to be had out there if you look around but after so many years I have met a lot of good people on RCU that I chat with on a regular basis with PMs, email and by phone. Like flying at a field or club, it's the people that make something fun. I wouldn't leave RCU just because of server problems.
It does upset the hell out of me when I try to post and get a server error or it takes several minutes to open a thread. On the real bad RCU days I just go find something else to do. It's the people that make the site fun. It will get taken care of sooner or later, it always does. This isn't there first problem and it surre won't be the last.

Very True, my wife and I used to own a forum based website (www.thereeftank.com) and I know that it takes time and money and knowledge to keep a big site like this running, but I also know that if the site keeps being bad, it drives people away, which drives money away and creates a big bad problem.

I do enjoy a handful of people on this board and would love to meet them in person one of these days.

Jon

"many time when you fix one thing, something else pops up."

Typically that's a symptom of inadequate/non-existent testing. For as long as this site has been around, a robust sandbox and test environment and testcase suite should exist by now. What it feels like, is developers slamming code that is at best alpha level into production.

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!

BTW, I have a question I meant to ask.

Does RCU have a mission statement and where do I find that? I may be missing the defined purpose of RCU. If part of the mission is to bring people to RC then keep in mind that statistically if a person does not find the content they are looking for in under 20 seconds they move to another web site (this was analyzed many years ago and could even be much quicker now since folks are more web saavy). This can really affect product advertisers.

If the site is rebuilt from scratch, the old data (posts) will still be there

I timed out the first time I clicked on this thread.... []

Just got a internal 500 socket error when I last posted in the Questions and Answer Thread, then again on this one.


I second that vote to start over if you can get Ken to agree, and take it up with his boss. Hey Mike, if we took a vote on it, would it be considered?


Pete