Yes, it's been down since Tuesday night. As of 5pm yesterday, Ben still hadn't heard back from the tech team. That's the latest info I have.

Looks like the "tech team" dropped the ball on some of the IMO ill advised "improvements". Hope they have good backups.

Yes, DFO has been down a few days now! Why is it that every time a website has a "makeover" that there are so many issues? Personally, I saw nothing wrong with the previous iteration, even though that one still took me a while to get used to!

-Mark

Hope they get it worked out. From my experience, a lot usually has to do with the back-end stuff that runs the infrastructure of the web site. It all runs on software and scripting that gets upgrades and the only way to stay in the game is to go along with it. They can't foresee every issue because every site is different and that is where you run into stuff like that. Either tow-the-line and roll the dice with an upgrade or get penalized for just wanting to leave things alone. Remember when this site was down everyone was saying DFO runs great. Every web site runs into issues, which you may never see, because you rarely visit. It is the sites you get to know and visit often that you tend to see the issues when they happen. From one forum to another, I hope it gets resolved. And trust me when I say, I feel the pain they are going through!

DFO is a discussion forum but the owner for some reason has been convinced that having a home page that shows the hot topics, that doesn't update very often for some reason, and then having to click a couple of times to get to the forum is a good idea. I think he is trying to make it more like drummerworld to drive more visitors, and thus more ad revenue. It's his site and he can do as he sees fit but I personally think it's a mistake.

When you do an upgrade or update, you have to have a plan in place to reverse your changes if something goes wrong before you start. If you do, you can have a small outage that lasts anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours. Then you can go back through your code and see what was wrong while the site is up and everyone is happy. If you don't have a regression plan, well, you end up with days of downtime while you try to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Like I said before, I hope they have good backups.

100% agree. Before we even did the last update it was all set-up and tested on another server. We spent a few weeks testing it prior to the switch. It did go pretty smooth doing it that way. There were the obvious small issues, and then some things we never saw as needed which we quickly implemented. It pretty much went without a hitch. Since the database and the web site are usually separate, one could assume the data is safe. The interworking between the data and this new refresh is another story. I did not know the "story" so I spoke as just one knowing the woes of such a thing. Thanks for the insight and speculated the reasoning, that would change my thoughts on the subject. Always secure the data is my mantra... I hope theirs as well!

I've been trying to respond to this thread for over a minute! What the...

I know nothing about website operations, so maybe this suggestion is completely stupid...forgive me...but...mmmmaybe we could put all the picture files into a satellite website that could be linked to a different server, separately from the discussion topic area...? Like...this is the main house and the pictures are kept out in the garage so that the main house doesn't get cluttered type of thing...? heh heh?