OK, That's it!

[Ships R Great]

Like the rest of you, I have been having trouble with slow boards and NO boards for the last I don't know how many days. I know Laura is looking into it now that she is back but, really, I have just about had it.

 

For whatever reason the boards have been "down" or slooooooooow. I have not joined in the complaining on the other thread but, right now, I want to know who the sponsors (owners) of CC are. I am ready to boycott. They should have figured out the problem and done something about it by now.

 

And it can't be graphics/long posts/fancy fonts/etc. Those have always been here.

 

Go ahead, flame. I am ready for it!

[CruisingChick]

No flaming here.

 

I have also been having problems for over a month now. If I don't come on first thing in the morning and read and post then I can't get on later in the day. Once lunch time hits forget it. I can't even get the boards to come up on my computer.

 

Anne Maria

[tazmancruiser]

I had a lot of trouble with my old comp.

Finnally bombed out and had to get a new one.

I haven't had a problem for a month know. Guess I should knock on wood.

I don't have any of the add ons on my name or whatever you call them.

Though I agree you that add ons behind your name shouldn't make any diference.

I'm with you though it is very frustrating.

Sure, I too visit other cruise message boards.

But I like cruise critic the best.

[tbelian]

Well, not for 'us' cruisers, but for the 'owners' of the site. Just think of how P'oed the advertisers must be. All those lost 'impressions'. I hope THEY are demanding a free somethin'

 

Can you say 'too big for ya britches?!' ....

[BigPaul26]

We need to be careful what we ask for here, one of the other ways for CC to make some more money and invest in better or more servers/bandwidth is to make this a membership deal. I hate to say it, but the graphics do take away bandwidth from the servers. If we send a text message with 2 smiley faces and one interacting smiley face those avatars or smiley faces probably take up 99% of the bandwidth necesarry for that single message. I am not a fully dedicated IT professional but I know my stuff for the most part and maybe someone else can back me up on this.

 

 

Paul

[reggierail]

I think you're right about the graphics problem. I have shut them off in my CP and everything is working better since I did that.

A while back they had a test where they removed the signatures and avatars and I noticed a big improvement in the boards. Maybe it's time to initiate that again. I get real tired of viewing the same poster with numerous animated graphics especially when they have several posts on the same page. I try to include my sig only once per page.

Take a look at the Carnival board and it seems like 90% of the space is taken up by animated graphics.

 

Reggie:D

[djammons]

I have been having problems with the board freezing up for weeks now and it doesn't mater if I am accessing it on my laptop from home or work or my home desktop computer.

 

I really enjoy this board but it is incredibly frustrating for this to not get resolved.

 

I have already searched and found alternative boards but like others have stated I don't like them as much.

 

It will be a shame if the frustration reaches a point where many of us abandon this board here. I am close.

 

Surely the operators / owners of this board have to realize that any income derived from advertising is in jepoardy if the board is not operating properly.

[ShipsAhoy]

I think you're right about the graphics problem. Reggie:D

 

It's kind of like wearing too much bling bling!!!

[CinWin]

It has been really frustrating the past couple of days trying to get into the message boards here. It is very "hit and miss" whether anything will open or not. Even if it does, it takes FOREVER. Hope it can be improved cause CC board definitely has the best information for cruisers.

Cindy

[greydog]

It appears to me that the poor board performance is associated with the monthly release of the pop-up page promoting the cruise-critic subscription newsletter. This pop-up is probably running up against folk's security settings. I have logged out and found that promo page active in the background. I finally checked the box to 'not show this again', hoping that means 'never' as just to current month. I guess its unlikely they will stop their promos - just TV with its commercials - could we TIVO cruisecritic?? :D

[mafig]

I don't see any pop up page. I remember I used to. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.;) :confused: :p

[canderson]

We need to be careful what we ask for here, one of the other ways for CC to make some more money and invest in better or more servers/bandwidth is to make this a membership deal. I hate to say it, but the graphics do take away bandwidth from the servers. If we send a text message with 2 smiley faces and one interacting smiley face those avatars or smiley faces probably take up 99% of the bandwidth necesarry for that single message. I am not a fully dedicated IT professional but I know my stuff for the most part and maybe someone else can back me up on this.

 

 

Paul

The "internal" graphics will have some effect, as you say, but the items that are added in a signature line will not. Those are links to other sites, and place no burden on the CC server -- the data to complete these graphics come from elsewhere. It's not like the CC server is going out and getting them -- it each individual user's machine that has to pick up the information for countdown clocks, etc., through the links that are created in the signature blocks by the users here.

 

As a result (and again, I'm still not convinced this is purely a capacity issue of any kind) one would think that the graphics that have to be generated from CC's servers (avatars and smiley faces) would be the first ones to go. HOWEVER -- most folks have their browser caching set up to the original defaults such that these are already resident on the user's hard drive, and wouldn't have to be pulled from CC again, wouldn't you think?

 

What does that leave us with?

 

Again, however -- I've been hit with outages at low demand times and have had good service (like now) during lunch. I'm still a long ways from being convinced that capacity or configuration in the face of demand is the whole story here.

[LauraS]

It appears to me that the poor board performance is associated with the monthly release of the pop-up page promoting the cruise-critic subscription newsletter. This pop-up is probably running up against folk's security settings. I have logged out and found that promo page active in the background. I finally checked the box to 'not show this again', hoping that means 'never' as just to current month. I guess its unlikely they will stop their promos - just TV with its commercials - could we TIVO cruisecritic?? :D

 

The "newsletter" popup ad is NOT on the boards. It is on our homepage only.

 

Laura

[LauraS]

Hello everyone:

 

Here's what we're going to be doing over the next week or so.

 

We're going to have to PRUNE our database down to about 60% of what we are storing now. This means that posts will have to go.

 

We're determining the best method by which to accomplish this. I've been told that members' post counts will NOT be affected, but as with all things "computer related" I believe nothing until I see it with my own eyes.

 

We haven't decided yet on when this will occur, but I will be conducting testing today and early next week.

 

There are a few other scenarios we're working on to tweak performance as well. Hopefully, they work and we can get things back to normal around here.

 

Laura

[Rich&Natalia]

Laura,

 

Thanks for all your work on this issue. I, for one, don't care that much about old archives. Let's get rid of them ASAP and get the site back on track. :)

Rich

[mii]

Laura, thanks for the reply. Could you possibly tell us what you reported on this board to the rest of the boards? There is alot of grumbling on all of the cruise lines. Thanks so much.

 

Marilyn

[Ships R Great]

Thanks, Laura. As the OP I feel I need to let you know I appreciate that you folks are trying to get things back on track. CC is important to all of us and we don't like to be locked out, for whatever reason. As per the archives, do what you have to do to fix things. Somebody is bound to be unhappy but the majority of us just want our old reliable CC back, whatever it takes.

[sunpsyche]

Yeah!!! I'd pretty much given up trying to access these boards. No problems today. I also don't much care about the archieves. Thanks, Laura!!

[DrKoob]

There is no free lunch--but some of you think there is and you get upset when the free lunch is served late or they don't give you exactly what you want when you want it.

 

That about says it all. Many of us have become accustomed to everything (or at least a most everything) on the web being free. I subscribe to other specialty websites much like CC where I can post and many of them are membership sites. It always amazes me when people complain about the quality of something that they get for free.

 

As a web designer I can not believe the amount of bandwidth and storage that CC gives us for free so we can get info, meet friends and give us a place to air our compliments and complaints. I would gladly pay a membership fee to be able to access this great site. In fact, maybe CC should consider two levels of service, much like IMBD does and with IMBD pro and lets CC pro folks have faster bandwidth and a larger limitations on posts.

 

Just a thought.

[canderson]

There is no free lunch--but some of you think there is and you get upset when the free lunch is served late or they don't give you exactly what you want when you want it.

Yo, Doc. I just received my invoice for the hardcopy version of "Cruise Reviews & News". I originally subscribed as a method of helping to support the on-line effort here. What do you think I ought to do with this renewal form? A week ago when I received it, that was a serious question. Today, I think I'll send it back with a check.

 

I would gladly pay a membership fee to be able to access this great site.

Now you know how.

 

Just a thought.

[WCAB]

There is no free lunch--but some of you think there is and you get upset when the free lunch is served late or they don't give you exactly what you want when you want it.

 

Frustration is not measured by cost. It is very nice that we can communicate about our cruises and that it is free but following numerous attempts to post, my thoughts are not tied to cost but my tolerance is controlled by my stress level. Charge or not, if it is not working, people will find some other board.

 

Since this seems to be the best board as far as good information and participation, I hope it all gets worked out.

 

Carol

[canderson]

Apart from the infamous "white pages", some of us have been noting and griping about the total freeze ups of IE6 when we hit the "Submit Reply" button. Often, the entire reply is lost, and many times, it is necessary to completely kill the IExplorer task with the Task Manager and start IExplorer up again. Seems this isn't news.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you'd bring the following to your webmaster's attention, it would be appreciated since we will finally get rid of this particularly irksome bug. Note: you are currently running version 3.0.8 of vBulletin. From the Jelsoft (vBulletin) board of September 9:

 

Version 3.0.9 remedies various problems identified in 3.0.8, in particular a problem with Internet Explorer freezing while posting a message, and an issue relating to the mailqueue failing to send digest email notifications.

[CaroleSP]

It's kind of like wearing too much bling bling!!!

 

Even though I mostly agree with you, I can't go along with this; there's no such thing as too much bling bling! Maybe too much chocolate; it can make you sick (not me, but someone else)

[kryos]

I hate to say it, but the graphics do take away bandwidth from the servers. If we send a text message with 2 smiley faces and one interacting smiley face those avatars or smiley faces probably take up 99% of the bandwidth necesarry for that single message. I am not a fully dedicated IT professional but I know my stuff for the most part and maybe someone else can back me up on this.

I agree. Almost everyone, myself included, has fancy sig lines. While those sig lines may not reside on the same servers as the posts, they still have to be downloaded. That takes up bandwidth on both ends. While we can set up our user cp not to show signatures, and thus improve response time on our end, that does not totally resolve the problem. Maybe in the past all the fancy graphics didn't slow things down because there weren't as many users on the board. But, now that CC is getting more of a reputation in the main stream media, we are probably having more and more folks joining this board, or at least visiting it. That's gotta slow things down.

 

I don't know what the solution would be. Money, I am sure, is limited. There are only so many advertisers on the site ... so much revenue coming in. New and bigger servers cost money. Who is gonna pay for that if advertising revenues are not sufficient? Remember, too, that the more a board like this charges for advertising, the more influential those advertisers become. That means there will be more and more censorship on these boards as those advertisers gain more clout. Let's face it, if RCCL is paying a whopping sum each month for advertising, they are probably gonna want to be assured that no one on this board will "diss" them. While today the only real restriction is travel agents advertising their own groups on these boards, at some point in the future there may be other restrictions ... less freedom in what we can say. None of us wants that, right?

 

So, getting back to the main question ... who pays for better service, or do we just learn to live with what we have? I hate to say it, but it sounds to me like eventually it may be us who has to pay for it. Perhaps we may be charged a "premium" membership fee if we wish to have certain privileges on this board ... things like fancy avatars and signatures, unlimited posting privileges. That might be the only solution.

 

And, for others who don't wish to pay (like myself), we may be relagated to a limited number of posts per day, with only a few smileys allowed, and everything else being strictly text-based ... as in the old days of usenet.

 

Blue skies ...

 

--rita

[kryos]

I had a lot of trouble with my old comp.

Finnally bombed out and had to get a new one.

I haven't had a problem for a month know. Guess I should knock on wood.

I don't have any of the add ons on my name or whatever you call them.

Though I agree you that add ons behind your name shouldn't make any diference.

I'm with you though it is very frustrating.

Sure, I too visit other cruise message boards.

But I like cruise critic the best.

You are very, very lucky indeed.

 

I too can rarely get on after lunchtime, nor in the evenings. I have a feeling you have been lucky in that you have thus far gotten on before the servers' maximum capacity has been reached. I think once so many people are on the board, others are just out of luck until some people log out.

 

I have tried getting on this board at different times using both my home computer (DSL) and work computer (T3 line) ... no difference. If it is within certain time periods, I don't get in ... period.

 

I visit other cruise message boards myself, but they don't compare to CC. Often there may be about two dozen new posts since the previous day tops. But, I think that will probably change as more and more people throw up their hands in disgust with CC. :(

 

Blue skies ...

 

--rita