LOL
Posted on 10/23/2012 3:58:44 AM PDT by PittsburghAfterDark
The 4th and final of the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates have come and gone for 2012.
Here are the three things we can walk away with.
- Romney can't lose a debate coin toss, going 3 for 3. Which of course means nothing.
- Obama gets more moderated debate time, going 3 for 3 in the time column. Which of course means nothing.
- Free Republic crashes before any debate and doesn't get back to normal until dawn the next day.
I would like to state that I have been here since the 2004 election season. I can't lay claim to being an old timer here compared to some of the posters here. I can safely say though that I am not a spur of the moment account meant to come here and spam, insult and run away.
Here's my point; Free Republic is in danger of not being relevant and it's purely because of technical reasons.
I know your technical team or advisor is trying like mad to isolate why this site is unavailable for hours on end surrounding the debates this year. It's not working.
This debate season for Free Republic has been the equivalent of having a TV network go out for a wild card round, divisional round and conference or league championship. The network knew the times of the contest, they knew tons of people would be watching, they knew where the technical problems might arise yet failed 4 times over the course of every scheduled event.
Now the Super Bowl of American politics is 2 weeks away and the same team that has aired loading screens for every head to head political contest this year must realize this simple fact; if you're not up and running on election night 2012 you might as well close the door on any thought of continuing your political relevance.
Online communities do not build themselves overnight but they can collapse overnight. As inconceivable as it may be this could be a swan song moment that you were warned about, tried to prevent yet ultimately could not control. If your traffic can't get to your site, you have no site.
If you fail in giving voice to this community during what should or could be a glorious night for America your role in history will be noteworthy, just like print edition of Newsweek's coverage of the Presidential inauguration in 2013. Non-existent.
History will indeed be made on November 6th because of the nature of the event. The question Free Republic needs to determine is if it is going to report history or become part of it.
why don’t you go away and never come back!!!
I’m sorry. I can no longer agree to disagree. You will simply need to come around to my way of thinking.
LOL
How can we miss you if you'll never go away?
Fetch; good dog!
(((shudder)))
I would never wish something like that on YOU.... why would you curse ME like that?
Hey Laz...and everybody....
Got a question: Do we have more members now than we did 4 years ago? It could be a simple matter of more people trying to get on the site.
(I know...it’s simplistic, but sometimes the simple answers are the right ones.)
I mean, I wanted to follow the debates here, but I couldn’t even get ON the site until 45 minutes after the debates were over. I’m going to be relying on FR on election night as I don’t have cable TV. I know there’s going to be a ton of local election threads going on...not to mention the national ones.
And...a thought occurred to me: Not being a computer expert by any means, but is there a possiblity that some lib hacker has developed a program that automatically floods certain sites with traffic, kind of a ‘set-it-and-forget-it” spam program? I realize someone may already have thought of this and answered.
I love FR and I wish Jim and John nothing but the best. But, two weeks from today....FR’s going to be my eyes and ears on the most important election in US history. I hope to God I can use it.
For now my money on the cause centers on Van Jones and Axelrod being the main culprits.
Good one, my friend. (Have enjoyed your informative posts for years!)
FWIW, and I’m not complaining at all, FR was much better for me last night than during the other three debates.
I noticed that there was a lot of traffic in the afternoon about people switching to the Firefox browser/client. I’ve used Firefox exclusively for years, but can’t ignore the correlation between all the FReepers saying they were switching and the site performing so much better.
I agree with you. Free Republic has software problems and has had them for some time now starting before Election 2010.
I think it’s time to bring in a consultant to look it over. I love Free Republic. I want it to be around forever.
It’s not ‘sabotage’.
Did you look up where the parent ISP ntt.net is actually located?
The “servers” eventually resolve to gkg.net in CO at IP:209.157.64.200.
It’s a wonder FR loads on a good day.
Definitely needs a better/bigger web host and lots more bandwidth.
I agree whoelheartedly with those who say FR needs to seriously consider hiring IT professionals to run the site.
It’s getting far too much traffic for their web host to handle.
2 terabyte tansfer limits and 250g storage isn’t cutting it.
There are tons of web hosts that have Unlimited Data/ Storage/Unlimited Data Transfer
FatCow has forum capability and unlimited space/bandwidth and is *really* cheap and extremely dependable.
They’re also ranked #1 for forum hosting.
http://webhostinggeeks.com/bestforumhosting.html
Reckon you may as well be here for this.
1) The Free Republic website is the Robinson's gig. No amount of chatter or well-meaning advice will cause them to change their business plan or their approach to the construct of Free Republic.
2) From a systems point of view, FR is scaled to handle a certain amount of traffic. The high end of popularity was probably gauged by John at some point in the past - maybe 9/11 or a previous election cycle. This top end was likely used to determine FR's scalability in terms of usage handling. Elementary stuff.
3) Free Republic is both popular with its adherents and a target to its detractors. It is "attractive". This makes it vulnerable from a number of points of view. It can be killed with kindness by its popularity, and it can be attacked and its defenses overwhelmed by the haters. On debate nights, and on election night, we see a syzygy where both groups are drawn to FR. This amount of usage no doubt exceeds the system's abilities.
So - what does a business owner do when faced with this situation?
You consider ROI. Do you throw the limited money you have at a temporary problem by scaling the systems to accomodate a short-term, periodic event? Probably not. You take the hit and try to move past it, thinking that the value of your product will overcome the annoyance caused by outage.
However, is the draw of Free Republic greater than its unavailability during "crisis" times? Quite possibly, No. The stigma of downtime is enormous in these days of 100% availability and the use of social media. And that raises a very big question. How can John provide 100% uptime if he is the sole technical resource. Quite simply, it cannot be done.
What began as a hobby/bulletin board has turned into an technical enterprise and a technical enterprise cannot be run by one guy 24 x 7. As good as John is (and I’ve watched his work closely from an educated user POV over the past 12 years), it is a herculean task and more than he should have to bear.
So – what is to be done? In my humble and unsolicited opinion, if FR is to thrive in the long term:
1) The physical systems need to be rescaled to a new threshold. John can determine what that is.
2) Peak chat usage or "EVENTS", such as debate nights, election nights, etc. should be offloaded to a new, social media paradigm which is scaled to handle the enormous amount of traffic required.
Yes I know that “letting go” like this is anathema. Too bad. Tough times call for tough decisions. IMHO, Jim and John are betting the enterprise and risk being left behind as their user base moves to the new paradigm. The social media giants like twitter and facebook both have the capacity to handle these peak loads. I would recommend taking advantage of them by sponsoring these one-offs – talk them up! Sell them to the regular customers. Redirect your users from the primary FR website to these “alternately-hosted” sites for the duration of the event, and then back to normal. Think sales-y. Other companies do this frequently.
What are the risks and rewards of this approach?
Loss of control. Possibly a permanent shift to the new paradigm meaning loss of income. From the rewards side – John regains his life, FR becomes somewhat more predictable, FR gains credibility, FR becomes a shining beacon of light and the conservative cause prevails!
Just some thoughts.
The pipe being the main culprit makes more intuitive sense than most other possibilities, imho.
It just seems that database or other coding errors would cause sporadic / unpredictable poor performance, quite unlike the 'special event' logjams that occur here, almost like clockwork.
Possibly having the everything routed through a Tokyo backbone isn’t helping much, either.
I was just snooping around and there are literally tons of forum specific web hosts available.
No muss, no fuss and no errors.
Pros run the databases.
If it were my website, I’d be moving to one of them.
The specifics are way above my minimal familiarity, but this kind of brainstorming / teamwork can find workable / affordable solutions and put an end to all the bitchin' that J & J are surely about sick of by now.
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