The trouble is my friend, it’s the only option we have to keep the pressure up to get anything done !
If we all get fed up and drift off, the likelihood is that no improvements will ever be made. And then a couple of years down the line, when paying membership nosedives, the powers-that-be up in OC Towers will wonder why!
they do all know and most have bruises on their foreheads from all this…
I think the approach here needs to be more business like and the committee need to grasp the nettle.
Someone needs to put together a plan which shows the approach and broad timescales to introduce a better platform. At this stage they could show the milestones for this year - eg research/requirements/spec/costs/tender/agree supplier/timescale/build/test/implementation… At least then members would know that improvements are on the way through regular updates.
The milestones I’ve suggested are simply examples. In the business world difficult decisions are made on what projects go ahead and what don’t. If funding is an issue then maybe some things need to be suspended whilst this is put right such as magazine production just to give an example.
If we are losing members through the forum problems then it needs a more professional approach which means employing the right people to implement the best solution.
I appreciate that things are being done to to try and manage the existing system but in reality it’s not working despite their best efforts.
Is this issue ongoing (still) because:
A) No-one actually knows how to fix the problem?
B) No-one is prepared to do anything about the problem?
C) Are we “stuck” in some sort of financial contract?
D) A combination of all the above?
As I posted elsewhere, from the club accounts published on this website the club paid around £7500 for this “service” a couple of years ago. I can’t give more recent figures because for reasons unexplained, more recent club accounts don’t appear online.
That is 75 times more than the invoice I very recently received, as the administrator of a website for another car club. How we ever got involved in paying that sort of amount I cannot imagine.
I am another paid up member who has reluctantly decided that I will not be renewing club membership in future.
Of course we could be victims of the “Cyber War”! Maybe we’re being hacked by the Lada OC on Vlad’s instructions!
Fine by me.
I don’t want to be tempting fate, but over the last couple of days the forum has been as fast as Amazon, varying from about 0.5second for a post to show and worst case under 6 seconds for ‘Unread Topics’ to sort a list and post it.
I’ve not complained at all over the last few months because I’ve been in the position of trying to fix intractable hard-to-trace faults in the past with unhappy customer jumping up and down getting in the way, so I have great sympathy for those working hard behind the scenes. And then rarely is there praise when it is fixed!
Whatever has been done to work the miracle and sort it, well done and many thanks.
Hi Richard - thanks for noticing & replying. A change was made least week (Thursday evening if I remember correctly) to greatly reduce the amount of bot crawling traffic, as well as generally rate limiting excessive requests and these seem to have made a very substantial improvement.
We will continue to monitor, but the complaints dropping is hopefully a good measure of success for now.
As said previously/elsewhere there are longer term plans being formed around the forum, but keeping this one ticking over smoothly is still of great time importance in the meantime
I agree with RichardFX, the forum is much better the last few days.
I will not pretend to understand what ‘bot crawling traffic’ is (!), but whatever it is, reducing it has improved things no end - thank you.
I did not want to tempt anything…but now it’s been mentioned it is far better.
Think of driving on the right in France with Give Way to the Right, allowing vehicles to enter main road traffic from the side roads. Now think of the Arc de Triomphe roundabout and how it used to jam solid with all and sundry piling in at speed - because they could.
I used to notice that the website server accepted my request immediately (cycle-round symbol changes to X on FF browser page header), but then the browser would be waiting ages (X on tab doing the running dots instead) for the reply because now it was in the server queue. Same rule as the French driving, entry is immediate, but then it jams up with all the bots piling in as well, resulting in what is effectively denial of service. The number of automated search engines crawling the web (Bots) looking for stuff (links, articles, news, log-ins, account details, hacks, spying, you name it) is gigantic.
So an entry rule is required, eg in France the side roads are specifically Stopped and the main road has right of way - unless there is not a sign on it to say so!
I don’t know how the entry to the website has been controlled, but so far it has been effective. I hope it can stay that way.
Thanks again.