First of all:
To all of our users - I do sincerely apologize that I failed to let you know in advance that this outage would be taking place. I only got word on Friday and I intended to post, but then I got busy with work again and it just slipped my mind. Once the forums were down, I didn't think it would be appropriate to go to other sites and post "PoA is down" messages.
Now, back to Jesse...
I didn't intend it to be funny. I intended it to be useful. Why would I go through the effort of monitoring the server to be an ass? Why would I post detailed information of the downtime into the thread? Have you considered the possibility that I may be trying to help out?
Well, no, I didn't. I couldn't and still don't see what possible use is the log when I'd posted an hour earlier the reason why PoA was down, and that it was because our hosting vendor was doing hardware and electrical system work that overran the schedule. Other than telling us exactly how long the vendor had us offline, of what use is that log in this case?
If I wanted to be an ass...<snip>
That is the way my job works. I figured--why not run POA with that level of service?
With out smilies, I thought being an ass was exactly what you were trying to accomplish. It honestly didn't occur to me that you were really being serious, not sarcastic. I'm sorry that I misinterpreted your intent.
Since you were serious, allow me to respond:
1) This isn't my job, nor is it anyone else's job on the MC. This site is a volunteer project. As such the time we on the MC put into it is our
personal time, and I know I'm not alone in saying that while we're all committed to the PoA project, we also all value our
personal time.
2) This site doesn't feed families, put a roof over anyone's head, save lives, aid the poor, or take down terrorist organizations.
While of course we want POA to be online as much as possible, if it goes down for a brief period of time, it isn't mission critical to *anyone*. The site doesn't need or justify minute by minute live-time monitoring or notifications sent via phone, email, or even carrier pigeon. The site is a priority to all of us on the MC, but it isn't the #1 priority in our lives. We all have careers and personal lives to manage.
I and everyone else on the MC absolutely appreciates the devotion you all have to this site, it's very flattering.
However, I must ask you that if the site goes down, that you please just be patient. If its something within our control, it will get fixed as soon as feasible. I check the site several times a day, from home or work, unless I'm traveling, and even then, I usually check in anyway.
Its extremely unlikely that emails or PMs on other forums will reach me before I know somethings wrong because I check POA before anything else. Phone calls might reach me before I find out for myself, but the last thing I want is to start getting phone calls from a couple hundred people because the site hiccuped. The odds are if the call does reach me, it'll be when I'm in no position to do anything about it, or when I'm already working on it, in which case it'll just be slowing down any efforts being made to bring things back online.
Overall, I've been very happy with the uptime on the new provider. I can't really begrudge them the fact that a major overhaul to their power systems took longer than expected. If I have one complaint, its' that they didn't let us know until the day of the outage - but I did know in advance and its my fault, not theirs, that you all weren't warned.
Chuck
