Still having a hard time getting on CSN

ASC - CSN & Greta...Respect and Appreciation
As far as I know as long as Greta is involved and has a say, CSN will stay here and be strong.

I know (or feel) that ACS is pushing What'sNext more so than than this site, which has always been kept separate.

The "upgrade" was mainly for hardware as best I know, with some enhancements that others within the CSN community requested.

Believe it or not, we (H&N) are just one of many community and forum here...

In this world of instant gratification and results, I know that we have a hard time dealing with inconvenience.

While I totally understand and get your frustrations, I have a different perspective than a few.

I'm an IT guy also, my degree from University of South Florida is B.S.I.T. so I love the technology, the fastest computers... I hate waiting for slow sites, slow software, slow computers... It drives me nuts having to wait.

But... I also understand that this site is out of my control, it is here free and purely as a source for us..survivors, care givers, those whom are new , the many somewhere in between.

It is maintained and presented to us at no cost, when there are spammers, they are taken care of, when someone becomes unruly or rude to others they are dealt with.

The site is set in an environment that makes it as easy and comfortable as possible to communicate, share and help others... Nothing is asked of any of us in return for that privilege.

So to the few that are more than a little vocal on how it's being handled... Well, I kind of find that rude, unappreciative, and actually disrespectful....

But again, that's just me, totally not associated with CSN in any way other than I consider the site something very special to me.

So even though it may be a little broken at the moment....it will recover, it will survive.

As others have mentioned.... Compare the site to you, me, others....

When I was at my worst, going through treatment, trying to recover...was I kicked to the curb, was I talked down to, was I ridiculed....was I given up?

John

lts said:

Well oiled machine!

Working super fast today. Read more in less time than ever. Thank You!!!

 

Luke

P.S.  Off to # 12.  Appointment at 9:37am.

Let Me In...

With you bro....

blackswampboy said:

"instant gratification", lol.

wow, that would be at least six months worth of "instant gratification".

needless to say, my perspective differs from yours.

we all appreciate the service that the ACS provides, and have clearly indicated as much (see above). 

we also understand that you have no affiliation with the ACS, and have not been tasked with speaking for them. so please do not take our error reports and constructive suggestions personally. clearly, it would be better for all--yourself included--if the ACS would acknowledge ongoing problems themselves, and directly communicate their intent to fix them. again, these problems have been going on for a long while, have frustrated many, and limit the function of a valuable service.

regarding your concern that we not "blame" ACS personalities--I dare say we are neither concerned with personalities nor affixing blame. in fact, most of us would have no idea who "Greta" is--or her involvement--if you did not keep mentioning her. again, we are not calling out "Greta". we seek solutions to longstanding problems, not blame.

for the record, I spent 25 years in the IT industry, and once upon a time set up and administered LAMP discussion forums myself. it was not particulary difficult all those years ago, and the basic technology has changed little since then. yep, still Linux-, Apache-, MySQL-, PHP-based, all these years later. this is not rocket science. especially if you're renting managed servers, which they are.

 

having said all that, so far so good today. let's hope that they've finally straightened things out! 

cheers.

It's working so far today....

YES!!  I've actually read three posts in a row...it took me 12 hours to do that yesterday...

p

Edit:  I wrote this, and there it sat....so I took the dog out to play (30 minutes)....washed my hair (10 minutes), and it was still sitting here spinning.  Finally went to my link and pushed it...and this had posted afterall, just didn't reflect that till I went back to the main site....I know it's not my computer, cuz the same thing happens at work.

CivilMatt said:

our cat

Justine The Wonder Cat

 

Here is Justine after a hard day getting on line.

 

Matt

 

 

 

this is where

this is where i would like to see them create an AGREE button. (alot like the facebook like button) everyone would see alot more support 

 

at least Justine is relaxing with knowledge it will get better....

 

john 

 

blackswampboy said:

"instant gratification", lol.

wow, that would be at least six months worth of "instant gratification".

needless to say, my perspective differs from yours.

we all appreciate the service that the ACS provides, and have clearly indicated as much (see above). 

we also understand that you have no affiliation with the ACS, and have not been tasked with speaking for them. so please do not take our error reports and constructive suggestions personally. clearly, it would be better for all--yourself included--if the ACS would acknowledge ongoing problems themselves, and directly communicate their intent to fix them. again, these problems have been going on for a long while, have frustrated many, and limit the function of a valuable service.

regarding your concern that we not "blame" ACS personalities--I dare say we are neither concerned with personalities nor affixing blame. in fact, most of us would have no idea who "Greta" is--or her involvement--if you did not keep mentioning her. again, we are not calling out "Greta". we seek solutions to longstanding problems, not blame.

for the record, I spent 25 years in the IT industry, and once upon a time set up and administered LAMP discussion forums myself. it was not particulary difficult all those years ago, and the basic technology has changed little since then. yep, still Linux-, Apache-, MySQL-, PHP-based, all these years later. this is not rocket science. especially if you're renting managed servers, which they are.

 

having said all that, so far so good today. let's hope that they've finally straightened things out! 

cheers.

tempting

so, we have at least several IT savvy folks here. Has anyone given any serious thought to creating a spinoff site for Head and Neck folks? I KNOW we can serve up pages way faster than this, especially if we do not go overboard on features and back end requirements. 

The other idea is to make a more formal inquiry to those that can influence getting more eyeballs and attention on this poor step child of a site. I'm all for that but would be glad to part of a party that collectively expresses the concerns of at least us here in this subforum.

Maybe we can do a poll about options to improve things. To me it is really not acceptable that such a really useful component of the ACS receives such little support ( on the IT side).

Don

Grandmax4 said:

The UpDate

Is driving me crazy~~~getting on is almost impossible, try to post or reply~~wait, wait, wait...server cannot find site...help!

 

Much Improved...

Actually, I thought that the connectivity and speed has much improved since late last Wednesday or Thursday other than a few glitches yesterday late evening while they were doing some things.

I had mentioned before and I did notice late last night that there was a "Down for Maintenance" message that popped up, and nearly instantly, first that I have seen that before.

That is much better than having you sit there staring ta a screen thinking it's trying to connect.

JG

fisrpotpe said:

stumbled

i may have stumbled accross something while pulling up the site. if you don't have your screen name and password  in the boxes, it sure seems like it is instant to the site. when i logged in next it was very slow. so then i tried it with the auto mattic log in when pulling up the site, it was then very slow again. 

at least for me over the last couple 3-5 days it is not worse, maybe somewhat better. still for me the thought of "nothing good comes easy"... with that we are all here doing something here that is good and it sure does not come easy    :-)

 

john 

so frustrating

I mentioned this before, the site is built on Drupal, the technolgy that feeds my family. What is going on is when a user is not logged on, drupal uses cached information much more than when a user is "authenticated", in order words logged in with an assigned role. Being signed in does not utilize the cache nearly as much and the resources required for logged users is higher. Just from observing the behaviour of this site, the issues is not enough memory. Upping memory can help a lot. The other place to look is the configuration for apache. What needs to be tuned is the various settings to release resources and such. Back those down and that will free resources much sooner for other uers.

 

HELLO IS ANBODY LISTENING?

 

The forums at http://oralcancersupport.org are blazing compared to this old wore out mare. 

 

sorry for the frustration but this site is not cancer or rocket science. Seems like most treat this like cancer and just deal with it like there is no hope.  For whatever reason, the proper level, at that is not much, is not being given to get this site running like a thoroughbred. There must be some heavy internal politics going on as it sure is not lack of financial or technical resources. 

greta said:

Yes, we are listening, and...

I am forwarding all the discussions on CSN to IT and others to keep them informed. There are no internal (or external) politics involved. Issues affecting the site aren't limited to Drupal, and none of them were anticipated. Most of the problems will be resolved, some faster than others. For example, new hardware is on order; it will take some time to arrive and do whatever needs to be done with it. I'm not a technical person, to which John can attest, but I can assure you that we are very much aware of the importance of CSN to you and others. I'm deeply sorry than the upgrade didn't go off without a hitch and that it has affected others adversely. We are doing our best to correct the problems as quickly as possible.

Regards,
Greta
aka Your CSN staff

thanks Grega

FWIW, I have just now gotten back in to the site.  I have attempted perhaps twenty times since yesterday afternoon, and every effort timed out.

 

Pat

VivianLee5689 said:

Frustrating yes

If I didn't like everyone so much I would just give up, but you guys are worth the wait.  Have a great day?  Crossing my fingers this post makes it online  LOL

Big Time

Getting on the site for over 2 months has been a really trying experience!!!!  Vivian. Hope your husband is having a better week than the past few,

Regards

Joe

greta said:

Yes, we are listening, and...

I am forwarding all the discussions on CSN to IT and others to keep them informed. There are no internal (or external) politics involved. Issues affecting the site aren't limited to Drupal, and none of them were anticipated. Most of the problems will be resolved, some faster than others. For example, new hardware is on order; it will take some time to arrive and do whatever needs to be done with it. I'm not a technical person, to which John can attest, but I can assure you that we are very much aware of the importance of CSN to you and others. I'm deeply sorry than the upgrade didn't go off without a hitch and that it has affected others adversely. We are doing our best to correct the problems as quickly as possible.

Regards,
Greta
aka Your CSN staff

Thanks for the reply

Hi Greta,

 

I appreciate the response. However, this is the FIRST post I have seen from anyone directly involved with CSN who has offered any first hand status on the problems. Even the "scheduled" outage the other night should have been communicated to the forums. All it takes is to create a node that displays on the first page.

As to Drupal only, I'm not sure where you got that impression from me. I have made numerous posts indicating it is a hardware issue, lack of memory and likely config settings that need adjusting. As to the hardware issue, CSN hosts at Liquid Web, same place where I run many client sites. It seems like CSN would not rent empty rack space there and directly mangage the hardware. Could be the case but there data centers are nowhere near Atlanta. Maybe CSN has staff or contracts more local to their sites.

More likely you may be using hardware that is configured by LW and it should NOT take much time to get upgraded hardware provisioned. If that is what they are telling you then, my suggestion is to dig deeper. Any hardware related issue for a generic LAMP stack and PHP app like Drupal is a commodity and should get resolved by LW in a day or two. The migration issues might take a bit longer but not weeks.

Lastly, from this end, I do not see any network or bandwidth issues. The common situation is when the "members online" count goes over mid teens, things slow down. I can generally count on the site responding late in the evening PST. 

Sorry if I come across aggravated but I am very thankful for the site and support it. But there is no sugar coating the loss of data nor slow response to get this resolved. At worst case, now too late, after the upgrade has big problems, the decision should be to back it out and roll back to the older version then go back to the drawing board. However, it seems there is inadequate expertise or organization in place to handle a farily pedestrian IT expercise. My God only 30 ppl and it locks up?