Testing testing testing. User error or site problem?

It's not often I have to ban people from JoeUser.com. The Terms of Service (linked below) spell out the definite no-no's. But that doesn't stop some people from trying to play victim if they get banned. I'll be the first to admit that the rules are not universally enforced. That's mostly an issue of the administrators only being able to read a tiny % of the articles on the site. So statistically, what happens is that banning occurs in discussions in which an administrator is a particip...

Pathetic Whining Mode: Activated So as the week comes to an end I've had a lot of people contact me saying "Hey, you're famous, Rush Limbaugh talked about you on the air today". And when he didn't mention me by name, he quoted my article or referred to me as an "unknown blogger" or "rank amateur" or "some nobody" whatever. I can't say it was a fun experience.  While at work, I'll regularly listen to talk radio which includes Rush Limbaugh on occasion. It's definitely not f...

There's a lot of super powers to choose from.  Flight, super strength, invulnerability, super speed, invisibility. But if you had to choose one? Which would it be? Being invulernable would be kind of nice but on the other hand, you could get stuck in a bad situation.  That's where super strength would be nice.  But super strength would be problematic because you could really hurt yourself. The more I think about it, the more I conclude that most powers need to come in pai...

Everyone has things that get on their nerves. Things that really bug them.  Here's a list of some of mine: People not taking responsibility for their actions or behavior People who use arrogance as a debate tactic People who think they have leverage when they do not People lacking self control Passive/aggressive people. People who let the slightest obstacle stimey them. People who think other people should take care of them. People who worry too much about what other people make...

Family and friends who have been outdoors with me have commented/observed that I don't get mosquito bites.  That isn't to say mosquitos never bite me but it's pretty uncommon.  I've never had the pleasure of having a mosquito bite to scratch. Now before someone thinks this is a conceit, consider what this means. Mosquitos don't think I'm good enough for them.  That's a level of rejection that, frankly, I'm not really able to handle well. This weekend we went up north and me,...

For the first time in years I can happily say that JoeUser.com is running very very fast.  The server upgrade is a success.  Yay!

Be careful what you wish for. Saying "Oh, I wish I could stay here another day.." can sometimes make it come true.  Our flight is canceled so here we are, still in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the world of skinning, the # of creators to consumers has, over time gotten to the point where it's nearly all consumers and almost nobody is creating the content. I'm seeing a little of this in blogging. Joeuser's traffic has been improving at a pretty good pace as the servers have gotten faster again and the reliability has improved. But there's fewer new blogs to read through.  Of course, weather is getting nicer and we don't promote JoeUser for new bloggers, but it's still an i...

JoeUser may be a neat site but it hasn't been IMO a very reliable site. Down times, slow speeds, flakey behavior, bugs, etc.  On the one hand, it's free, so how can we complain? But on the other hand, it's still been down, slow, flakey, and buggy and that just because you're free doesn't mean that you're above criticism. But in the past few days, we've finally started the full upgrade process on our entire server farm.  Shortly after GalCiv II shipped, we did some emergency updates ...

Since Thanksgiving, I've worked every day, 7 days a week, including Christmas other than last weekend where I took one day off.  Why?  What drives me isn't money. I'm a computer geek. What money I have I put into computer hardware and other gadgets and most of that is taken care of by the company. I do have a nice car . I drive it the whole 6.2 miles back and forth to the office.  But that's about it.  I don't even have a big screen TV.  My main TV isn't even high-d...

I took my son to Best Buy to get Galactic Civilizations II.  I wonder how many of his friends believe his dad makes computer games? Probably not many. LOL.

As mentioned previously, the new servers have arrived and the coding team has been working around the clock to optimize code and make tweaks. JU is back! Hopefully you can already tell a performance increase.  

Our achilles heel.  Stardock's server farm has a lot of redundancy. But it has a bottle neck that until the last few months wasn't really a bottleneck. It's a server called Marvin.  Marvin is our Stardock.net account server.  It traditionally hasn't been that busy, but as more and more sites start using it, it's gotten bad. Very bad. The long term solution is to cluster it and use replication to mirror accounts onto other machines to load balance. But that's going to take ti...

Every community, especially one as close-knit as JU's is going to have melodrama.  Sometimes, it's like watching a car wreck. You don't want to look but it's hard not to. Drama, intrigue, gossip, they're hard to resist. I tend to be a pretty plain person.  I think that's why I've stayed interested in on-line communities for so long or at least survived them this long.  Being straight forward and consistent is, in my opinion, the key to thriving long-term in an on-line commu...