Recent maintenance on website
Comments
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It's the first time since last Thursday that I've been able to access CT via "latest activity" (I'm too lazy to wade through all the discussions to spot anything of interest!
).So something must have been fixed!
Have I missed anything crucial?
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I probably have one of the fastest providers with cable internet and CT was still slow for me and had server errors.
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Hi Cyberyacht
Thanks for your comments. I understand yours (and others) frustrations with the recent performance of the website, and CT in particular. I'd like to address the points that you made. Note: I'm NOT senior management and these are just the thoughts and comments of someone working on the technical issues recently, so this is not an official response, per se.
Firstly, I never said that most of the code was written by an "outside outfit", as you put it. It's not unusual for an organisation with a large, complex website to use the services of 3rd parties. The website as a whole sits on one of the leading web content management systems (CMS) and e-commerce systems. The website you see has a mix of standard CMS/e-comm code, code that has been written and developed by one of the platform's "gold partners", code that has been written by our internal web development team and content that is written by an in-house content team.
In answer to your numbered questions -
1. The CMS gold partner that was originally engaged for the relaunched Club website back in 2016 have since been replaced by another partner. We have been with the current partner for a couple of years now.
2. I'm not aware of any penalty clauses in the contract with any partners (it's not something I deal with) and believe that would probably be commercially sensitive even if I knew the answers and therefore wouldn't be able to publish here.
3. No, we originally picked a company that were an established, well-known CMS gold partner. When they were replaced, it was a decision made for numerous reasons but this wasn't a case of finding the cheapest.
4. No, but we are (as I've previously stated) looking to upgrade the platform. This is a large project that involves many aspects of the website being upgraded in separate chunks.
I hope this answers your questions.
I'd also like to point out that the Senior Managment team have briefed with progress over the past two weeks of intermittent issues. As you will see from your experience today, and that of the many others that have posted this morning, the website seems far more reliable since the lastest fix went in last night. Monitoring of performance is continuing around the clock and further tweaks to performance improvement will be made in the days ahead.
Regards
Justin
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It is much improved although I did get another "server error" within the last hour.
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Thanks for addressing CY's points, Justin. 😉
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Justin, I’m finding sometimes my new posts appear instantly and at other times, not. It seems completely random.
I'm now using Safari on iPad and the white delay isn’t so noticeable 🤷🏻♂️
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I'm happy to give a cautious thumbs up to Justin and his team firstly for responding several times over the past week to comments on the forum and in some detail. Secondly the forum does seems to be working better it's a lot faster even though it could be better still.
So far I haven't had a server error, although now I posted that I realize I'm tempting fate.🤞
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Hi Tin
Firstly, apologies for calling you Tim earlier :-)
Secondly, I asked the question re why posts are sometimes appearing instantly and sometimes taking a few seconds to appear. The reason is due to a caching change that was made as part of the stability/performance improvements. The cache is on a two minute cycle, so depending on what part of the cache cycle you start typing/submit your post means it may appear instantly or it may take a little while.
Regards
Justin
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Thanks, Justin.
You aren't the first and I doubt you'll be the last to misread N/M. I often think I should have spelled the last bit 'whealer' as in Cornish tin mines.😀
I understand what you're saying. It's a change that's causing the delay but not a fault. That’s good.👍🏻
So far it’s holding up well, even during the national teatime slow down. 🙂
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Well, I don’t know what, or how, you’ve dealt with the problems on CT but I’d just like to say thank you Justin and team! It has been great today, lovely to catch up with things without any ‘issues’, well done to all concerned.
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I've been calling CT some very bad names the last few nights , so well done to Justin and his oppo's . Also very nice to see a member of staff not afraid to put their head above the parapet , knowing full well it's likely to be shot at .😀.
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See, I said it wasn’t worth stressing about. 😂
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At least I've got a Christmas card list 😛
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Thanks Heddlo and everyone else for the positive comments.
After tearing our hair out for the past few weeks, it was a real pleasure to come on here today and see some positive feedback. I'd love to claim the glory (and I did try to in one of the technical team calls this morning, haha) but it's been a real team effort. My 12-14 hour days pale into insignificance compared to the shifts some of the team have been putting in. As an example, some of the guys working on the fix last night had already done a full day's week before coming back online at 9pm, finishing at 2am and then being back online at 8am.
We know it's still not quite 100% and some of the pages aren't loading as quickly as we'd like but we think we've cracked the Internal Server Error issue.
The technical teams involved still have a couple of potential changes that are being explored; one of which will probably mean an outage to the website at 10pm Thursday.... Just giving you advance notice, as I don't want you sitting there at 10.01pm tomorrow thinking "here we go again, it's broken".
There are several hundred thousand emails going out to members over the next few days (some of which have already gone out today) and we do expect to see higher load on the site because of this but, with the recent changes we've made, we're confident the site will cope with the increased traffic.
Can I get back to playing with my lego set now please?
Justin
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Aghhhh! Don't mention the L*go men.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Well done to all at the sharp end that have, at least, got the web site up and running much more smoothly, and a special thanks to Justin for his input and explanation.
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I remember folk saying the staff pay no heed to CT. I wonder if they were wrong🤣🤣
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I’m getting server error messages on the front discussion page and on latest activity 😢😢
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TW - can you let me know what time you were getting those errors? I can't replicate them at the moment
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I'd just had my second by 10:54
One on my phone & the other at a proper PC
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As far as I can recall, Justin, it was only a minute or so before I posted. As Latest Activity will not now roll back far enough for me to see what I did, I tried to access my activity via my profile and got this -
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I've had a couple of posts where after posting the post hasn't shown, so I've refreshed the page and still not shown. I've then replicated the post and then both posts have appeared. I haven't duplicated a post for ages prior to the last 2 days.
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WN, Justin explained this yesterday. It’s not an actual fault but, due to the changes, new posts can take up to 2 mins to appear.
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Is this another fault that's occurred?
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