AOPA forums down?

up down up down up down

AOPA forums are making me seasick.
 
Jeff K said:
Is there a good thread/way to get a flavor for the POA board? I like what I see so far and I suspect alot of displaced Red Board users will be looking for a new site.
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This site was started with us displaced/pee'd off RB users.

RT
 
What is the sound of a website falling in the forest when all the pilots are out flying instead of watching it?
 
Instead of saying "....does a bear s$%t in the woods?..." we could start saying "....do the AOPA forums crash?..."
 
Oh, it's not just the forums - more importantly, members cannot renew their memberships through the website. Next thing you know, they'll be whining about losing members. Some folks just don't have the time or patience to deal with making a phone call for renewal.
 
This makes no sense in this amount of time I could have built them a new system that wouldn't suck.
 
jesse said:
This makes no sense in this amount of time I could have built them a new system that wouldn't suck.
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It makes total sense. Many inexperienced IT folk will spin on a problem until they person who writes the checks tells the to stop.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
jesse said:
This makes no sense in this amount of time I could have built them a new system that wouldn't suck.
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LOL - in this amount of time, AOPA could have dropped their project plan, stood up some new service that was actually reliable, migrated their database manually to the new system, and called it a day.

Had I been running their IT department, I'd have made that call on day 2 or 3 at the absolute latest.

Day 6? Yeah, this is many, many days beyond where you give up and try a new approach. Its clear that whomever makes these decisions doesn't know what they're doing, and is trying to fix a system rather than being nimble and thinking on their feet.

In many ways, I'm glad they work for AOPA and not for me. I wouldn't be very happy to be coaching this guy right now.

Edit: Odds on finding out they're using SugarCRM because it's free? LOL.
 
SkyHog said:
Edit: Odds on finding out they're using SugarCRM because it's free? LOL.
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Free? When they can spend money? :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Seriously.... it looks like they're running Personify (at least the member renewal section headers show Personify eBusiness), and the member renewal section is not a great implementation - confusing at best. It's almost like they took a product ordering package and tried to do renewals with it.

My guess is also that there were some hacks to make the forums tie back to the member database, and my guess is that there's a fair amount of customization that has to be done with Personify as it's not really a standard option.

I'd place money on their systems not working well for some time going forward.
 
Oh, and the emails are issued through uapps.net, which is a domain owned by TMA, who also produces Personify.
 
wsuffa said:
Oh, and the emails are issued through uapps.net, which is a domain owned by TMA, who also produces Personify.
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Well there ya go. It was a joke anyway, Bill - was referring to their decision making :)
 
SkyHog said:
Well there ya go. It was a joke anyway, Bill - was referring to their decision making :)
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Oh, I understood that it was a joke. I just happened that I got to see the results of a renewal done this AM, and was easily able to identify the package.

If it's an outsource deal, there's even less of an excuse for the downtime & screwed up implementation.
 
The silly part is they don't really have that much traffic. I bet if I knew wtf their problem was and had free reigns to fix it I could have it fixed before tomorrow with a single AWS instance.
 
jesse said:
This makes no sense in this amount of time I could have built them a new system that wouldn't suck.
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:lol:..

AOPA has spent the IT money on Executive salaries, perks and retirement programs..... :rolleyes2:
 
What a black eye. I'm embarrassed for them. but they'll treat it like the fedgov, all the people responsible will be promoted. The IT head will be the new members dept chief. If anyone does lose their job, they can go down the street and work for the DHS/TSA.
 
Many comments suggest themselves. Propriety and courtesy restrain me from sharing them.
 
jesse said:
The silly part is they don't really have that much traffic. I bet if I knew wtf their problem was and had free reigns to fix it I could have it fixed before tomorrow with a single AWS instance.
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Personify is one of the more complex association management systems. Wonder if it's like the SAP of the association world...
 
wsuffa said:
Personify is one of the more complex association management systems. Wonder if it's like the SAP of the association world...
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Well the very decision to hand all of their authentication over to Personify was a huge mistake. I'm sure there would have been a better implementation path.
 
SCCutler said:
Many comments suggest themselves. Propriety and courtesy restrain me from sharing them.
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Did you just accuse me of impropriety, and discourtesy? :yikes::yesnod:

I should be offended. Nah - I'll have another juice box, and maybe go for a morning swim. :D
 
So - what did they do, take a Viagra?!

I give it 45 minutes. If the "up" lasts more than 4 hours, consult a physician.
 
John221us said:
It makes total sense. Many inexperienced IT folk will spin on a problem until they person who writes the checks tells the to stop.
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Can't fault them for that. It is what an inexperienced IT person is usually tasked with and paid to do. :)
 
jesse said:
The silly part is they don't really have that much traffic. I bet if I knew wtf their problem was and had free reigns to fix it I could have it fixed before tomorrow with a single AWS instance.
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Yeah but you and I actually work weekends when we have to fix stuff. ;)
 
The response time seems back to normal now. Too soon to tell whether it will stay up.
 
Jeff K said:
Is there a good thread/way to get a flavor for the POA board? I like what I see so far and I suspect alot of displaced Red Board users will be looking for a new site.
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Jeff,

This site was started when AOPA announced that their old forums (the "yellow board") were going to be down for at least 6 weeks to be retooled, moderation added, etc. when the inevitable happened on their previously unmoderated board.

So, many of us, myself included, were AOPA forum members WAY back (in my case, since Oct. of 2001). The people who started this board did moderate it and took a fairly laid-back approach to it - Treat your fellow members with respect, post in the correct places (and we have a correct place even for the politics and religion, but you have to opt in), and this has turned into a wonderful place to chat with fellow pilots.

In fact, many of us never went back to the AOPA forums. Sure, I have an account there, but it's rare that I go there unless I want to post something to a wider audience.

Also, the uptime of PoA is truly impressive - Jesse does an excellent job keeping the site going, to the point that when I need to test if I have a good internet connection, I hit PoA instead of Google because I'm pretty sure PoA has better uptime.
 
The head of the IT dept at AOPA is Mr. Wie Fuk Up. We should contact him and find out what the deal is.
 
us AAirways said:
The head of the IT dept at AOPA is Mr. Wie Fuk Up. We should contact him and find out what the deal is.
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Have you confirmed this information with the fry guy at the nearest McDonald's? We want to make sure this is accurate information.
 
SkyHog said:
Right now, heads roll for us after 45 minutes. We strive for 99.99% uptime - which means less than 53 minutes PER YEAR of downtime.
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We get 99.998 (10 min 30 sec) but our internal KPI is 99.999 (5 min 20 sec). Not including planned downtime windows, which vary from 2 to 10 hours per weekend, usually 3 weekends per month.

If this was happening at my company, we would all be out of our jobs. But we have systems and processes that make it nearly impossible. Our last major outage was 6 years ago, and it lasted 18 minutes. We met .998 nearly every year, and .999 most years.

BUT... Bet you there isn't any major organizational change at AOPA over this. I was amused when I got one of their email newsletters late last week. I read it within 20 minutes of getting it. I clicked a link in the newsletter... Which lead to nothing. :)
 
John221us said:
It makes total sense. Many inexperienced IT folk will spin on a problem until they person who writes the checks tells the to stop.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
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No, it takes a very experienced IT person to do that.

consultingdemotivator.jpg
 
livitup said:
We get 99.998 (10 min 30 sec) but our internal KPI is 99.999 (5 min 20 sec). Not including planned downtime windows, which vary from 2 to 10 hours per weekend, usually 3 weekends per month.

If this was happening at my company, we would all be out of our jobs. But we have systems and processes that make it nearly impossible. Our last major outage was 6 years ago, and it lasted 18 minutes. We met .998 nearly every year, and .999 most years.
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I enjoyed reading this because we just saw an advertisement for Direct-TV which was calling for 99% uptime in response to claims that the system signal is not reliable - this adds up to 16 min a month - and you know that its not at 3am. . .
 
comanchepilot said:
I enjoyed reading this because we just saw an advertisement for Direct-TV which was calling for 99% uptime in response to claims that the system signal is not reliable - this adds up to 16 min a month - and you know that its not at 3am. . .
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Actually 99.0% is 7 hours 20 minutes per month. Plenty enough to be annoying, but hardly enough to go insane over. The average layman knows nothing about availability...and what a critical system really is.

Ask the average citizen how many minutes per month they are willing to be without power. "None at all, the power should work 100% of the time." Ask them how much per year, and some of the more reasonable ones might say "a couple hours here or there." My city power department had about a 99% uptime in the last 12 months --- I was still out of power for a total of 3.5 days out of the last 365. But honestly, that's good enough. But "99% availability" sounds much sexier than "40 hours of power outage".

What most people don't realize (and even people in high availability industries who don't work on availability management) is that successful availability management is rarely about money, but more about processes, procedures, and risk management. No amount of money spent on redundant webservers is going to prevent an outage caused by faulty code that management agreed to rush into production because the feature was promised to the customer for delivery last week.

Availability is a mindset, not a system or technical challenge.

</professional rant>
 
That's very zen, but availability is very much about money, and systems design, and serious tech challenges. We have commercial class systems, and we have enterprise class systems and there are definite differences in them. Like many companies we quote MTBF numbers(which are hilarious), and I work with customers who have zero downtime demands for critical systems that face the public.

Also, very large IT dept have adopted different meanings for downtime to make their availability numbers look better than they really are. I know one large phone company that suffered a pretty serious comms fault back in Feb where the reduced call volume on a trunk by about 70%, but technically they were not counting that as downtime. Sure, they had a backup to the backup server still providing switching, and it was running at 100% duty cycle but technically they were still 'up' and serving customers.

Luckily for me, many Fortune 100 customers pay good money to never, ever go down hard. Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen to good networks and things go Tango Uniform. It happened in a well publicized way to AA a little while back causing a ground stop for a lot of people. I work a lot with redundancy, and resiliency, and lots of other RAS features. Some of them work well, and some are kinda clunky. The clunky ones don't last well when there is an outage, and will be ripped and replaced pretty quick. That costs money, but being down costs more, or they wouldn't buy the best stuff in the world, and keep it well fed with techs and clusters, and backup power, and batteries, etc.
 
docmirror said:
That's very zen, but availability is very much about money, and systems design, and serious tech challenges.
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That. Achieving many nines requires many dollars. It's a mindset sure, but it still carries a great cost.
 
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