Stating the Obvious...

[E]

my comment may have been taken out of context.

i was speaking primarily to my terrible rash, my thirst, and the fact that i can't get to sleep without being lulled. i don't have much incidental cash lying around, and would like each of those issues to be addressed for free, specifically by the administrators.

i appreciate that the servers are down, and that this is causing some degree of duress for CG's users, but my ass-skin is hella' chapped.

[Swikan]

I think most of us feel like we were left hanging. The lack of communication from our service providers (whether we pay for the service or not) leaves us all out there hanging. There have been problems for a while now, and yet there is no official thread in the forums. The only status report, explanation, estimated time of repair, have been deeply tucked into this user-started thread, the title of which would not direct anyone in here to look for that information. So by the time users DO wander in here and find something, they are already so frustrated that their site has been down AND that they had to look in obscure places to find ANY information from the people who have control over these things, and that frustration only feeds of the frustration posted by other users.

The fact is that we rely on this service. Whether or not you pay for it is immaterial as CG agreed to provide the service and we agreed to use the service. We know this is the internet and things happen, but a little official communication when these things happen would curb the frustration a bit.

[Montyandwoolley]

At least we have these forums to find out whats going on, imagine if we didnt and all comunication was cut all together! - I dont know anyone here to ask if they have the same problem, so that would suck majorly! (Much like my spelling) Blarg, whatcha gonna do eh?

[Amtekoth]

I've heard back from the CG people.

I wrote: Hi,
ComicGenesis has been down a LOT lately. Can you PLEASE help upgrade their server?

Thanks,

Ed
----------------------------------------
They replied: Hi Ed,

We're sorry about that. We'll be adding a new server shortly that should
alleviate the problem.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. It's appreciated.

[RobertBlake]

I've heard back from the CG people.

I wrote: Hi,
ComicGenesis has been down a LOT lately. Can you PLEASE help upgrade their server?

Thanks,

Ed
----------------------------------------
They replied: Hi Ed,

We're sorry about that. We'll be adding a new server shortly that should
alleviate the problem.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. It's appreciated.

"Shortly" is rather ambiguous. An estimated ETA (next couple of days, within the week, etc.) would be better. Ah well. As long as it happens, I suppose.

[Kisai]

Folks, just hold on. Kisai and I are working on the servers, trying to get it back up. At worse, I'll get back on tonight to get the server stablized again at the expense of the webstats, which I'll try to keep archived.

The situation could best be described with duck hunt.

Shoot one duck, it goes down, but another comes up, sometimes two of em.

Here's the basic story for those tuning in thus far:
Every 4:55am some mystery borks the database
this starts a chain reaction of killing siteadmin, ftp, and finally the webserver due to a race condition.
Hard reseting the mysql server, kills the update queue, so that then needs to be manually investigated, and it looks like autokeen is now partly to blame as it seems to be responsible for the 6.0 processor load.

Common sense would say rollback to what we were running mid-may, problem is that it doesn't work that way. It was trying to update the server to resolve bugs and security issues that sent us down this stupid path of fixing one bug only to have two more show up, and it all seems to point to possible bugs introduced in mySQL or one of the underlying libraries, or things changed that I wrote without my knowledge

Threaded servers are EXTREMELY finicky. But we don't have the money to throw a new server up every 1000 users, It's just not plausable. Where google and eBay just throw more hardware at it, we've had ONE server the entire bloody time which I'd say is pretty good, but we could have had a half million or so users by now had we been given new hardware when we asked for it, etc. Instead signup delays were implemented (replacing the "once every few month batch run that everyone forgets about) instead of straigtup creation, even though the means to do it exists (wildcard DNS + dynamic site creation), the available performance has not been available.

But also, keep in mind that CG/KS hasn't sold out as much as the likes of myspace, youtube, photobucket, deviant art, and various other "free" services that choke your screen with ads. Use the forums, it takes less than one second to load the entire page. Try that with most other "free" services. Like you have to wait several seconds, sometimes an entire minute for the entire page to load.

If we had been selling out more, maybe we would have more hardware, but at the expense of the community. I know people can host their own damn sites for 8$ a month elsewhere. So why doesn't everyone?

-Administration
-Cost
-No Community
-No ability to 'leave it and forget it'
-No credit card! (Many CG users are also minors or in college/university and can't afford to pay for decent food.)
-Automation

I could go on and on.

The point is that I'm not paid, Kelly's not paid, we haven't had a new server in ages (not since the last time the server went down and didn't come back, anyone remember schlock & YDK?)

Pretty much everything short of the actual autokeen updater and open source stuff. I wrote. PHPBB, and Wikimedia that runs on the forum server are modified somewhat from their stock configuration, the forums more so. The AutoKeen Updater was wrote originally by Nate and there are lots of legacy bits that I changed to be xhtml compliant and such in there, but I really want to rewrite it, and instead let Kelly take a shot at rewriting it instead. My specialty is really more reverse engineering and optimization, not building from scratch, as I overbuild things. There are empty tables in the DB from things I wanted to do with the Guide that I decided the wiki would do better. The Guide itself is not depreciated, but it's not community editable, which makes it harder to find related comics. The Guide I could compare to a card catalog or Yahoo circa 1999 before google was hot.

It works, but wiki's are a better idea. Plus anything that removes administration is a bonus. The community can edit the wiki and keep it updated, unlike many authors who never update their listing past the initial signup.

So if the server is down, stop bitching and go edit the wiki or something.

As far as I'm concerned, I fixed everything, but inevitably I'm going to wake up a 6pm and it'll be down or I goto work and come back at 9am and it will be down...

(Only days that Kelly doesn't log into it it seems to stay up, so I'm more inclined to think that maybe it's something being run manually. 4:55AM corresponds with 8AM Eastern time.)

[Linkara]

I for one want to thank Kisai, Redwolf, and anyone else who has been working hard to keep things going. It can't be an easy process and I appreciate that they care so much about this and the community to keep working at it. Kudos, admins!

Oh, and the updater seems to be working again. ^_~

[Jameslong]

again, thank you for the explaination, kisai.

[Dice]

It appears the Queue is moving along again. <3 Hopefully things will stay fixed this time. *folds hands* Please, please, please stay fixed!!

Kisai, STrRedWolf, you guys are awesome!! <3

[Sphix]

I'm incredibly surprised that I understood a lot of that... Thanks for taking the time to write out the problems, Kisai! I know it seems like a thankless job, but every person on CG is secretly grateful for the service you provide. ^_^

[LadyLeaMarie]

I for one want to thank Kisai, Redwolf, and anyone else who has been working hard to keep things going. It can't be an easy process and I appreciate that they care so much about this and the community to keep working at it. Kudos, admins!

Yeah, you guys rock! It cannot be an easy job and we dont' give you guys enough credit when things are working.

And thanks again for letting us know what's going on. If there's something that the community can do to help, please let us know.

[NakedElf]

...and while you're fixing the free server, could you also change my diaper for free, get me a ba-ba for free, and sing me to sleep...for free?

This may come as a surprise to you, but Comicgenesis is a business. They don't provide us servers out of the goodness of their hearts because they just feel like throwing money at webcomics, they provide us servers because doing so gets us to provide them free content, which means they can put ads on our comics and thus make money.

So long as the servers work and the content keeps coming, everyone benefits. If the servers don't work, no one benefits, but artists and authors aren't exactly going to stick around for long watching a business fail at the most basic things which keep it going.

CG isn't like a friend who occasionally bakes you free cookies. Your friend, you'll go see them even if they decide not to bake any cookies. Comicgenesis is a business. If Comicgenesis can't hold up its end of the bargain and provide basic hosting, then people have no reason to stay.

It just feels like the higher ups don't cares that there is a problem. This is not a one time incident this has been happening for over a month. And before we started pitching tantrum we did not even get an explanation. In fact no one even mentioned that the server crashed the first few times even though I am sure they knew about it.

Yeah, I feel like that, too, but I know it's not true. Presuming they don't hate money, they're busy doing whatever it takes to get the problems sorted out.

Personally, I think bad communication is actually the problem here--and I've noted CG having communication problems long before this happened. (Actually, communication problems seem to plague a lot of online-companies I've dealt with.) It's not a matter of not caring as much as a matter of having official policies which don't encourage staff to go making announcements to us every time a server has an issue. Which, frankly, I can understand.

Given comicgen's a free service, you'll have to excuse me while i scoff at those raving on how their "revenue" is being affected, if you're getting revenue, then stop being a tightwad and buy hosting that bitching at for being down is actually justified.

Transferring a wesbite is non-trivial. There are a lot of things out there linking to my comic. These links affect my Google hits, and Google directs people to my current address. Even if I were actually making money off my comic and therefore able to pay for hosting, I'd take a significant loss in readership/visitors. And since I don't get anything for making my comic (I've tried, ain't nobody interested in giving me money :P) the idea that people actually read my comics makes the endeavor worthwhile.

Or to sum: That'd be really annoying, and I've been quite happy with CG for a couple of years. I'd really rather they just fixed the servers than people get up and leave.

[Datachasers]

Thank you , for getting it up and running - i work in tech support and followed most of what you said

all i have to say is holy SQL batman ---

in anycase a big thank you from me - and as far as the compainers go they can just bugger off --

[VIIStar]

*purrs*
Thank you kindly for not acting like devart did. I have no problem being patient during server outs and directing traffic onto my own bandwidth, if that’s what it takes...

[Amtekoth]

I'm glad that my site's been up since yesterday evening.

But I think the queue is clogged...

Either that or my update disappeared into the luminiferous ether.

[Nicotine]

I'm glad that my site's been up since yesterday evening.

But I think the queue is clogged...

Either that or my update disappeared into the luminiferous ether.

I was wondering the same thing...
I wanted to update my site yesterday, and the queue was 88. Now it's over 3,000. Ah well, I'm hoping things get fixed...

[Drowemos]

I'm glad that my site's been up since yesterday evening.

But I think the queue is clogged...

It is all part of the great circle my son.

-You see it all starts with autokeen jamming.

-Then after a one or two forced restarts of autokeen the sever crashes

-The crashing or the server causes the artists to yell and scream and throw tantrums

-Then in response to the flames form the artists the server is jury rigged together and everything works for a day.

-Then autokeen starts jamming again.

The great circle controls everything, my son. Without the great circle we would have webcomics that were up for 3 consecutive days. Without the great circle we would have administrators who were happy and content with life instead of being ground down to emotional weeping pool of jelly. Without the great circle the owners would have to spend money on new equipment.

You see, my son, the great circle defines Comic Genesis and makes it what it is.

[Nicotine]

R...ight.

I'm just curious to know how your comic updated. I set mine to update yesterday and it still hasn't.

[Bobadventures]

Well, I have started a backup site for my strip on Livejournal. It's not very pretty at the moment, but the strip is viewable there, which is the important thing. I just upload the strips to my Flickr site, and then reference them on Livejournal. It works, it wasn't too difficult, and it's still all free.

I have the characters in today's strip explain what's going on.

When I get home from work tonight, I will see if I can temporarily change my ProjectWonderful ads to link directly to the LJ site. Once Comicgenesis.com is back to normal, I'll change the ad links back.

I'm not sure if I'll continue to maintain the LJ once the server problems are fixed here. ComicGenesis is certainly better for a webcomic than LJ is.

The LiveJournal backup site for The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! is
http://bobadventures.livejournal.com

and the normal, Comicgenesis URL is
http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com

And thank you Kisai and Redwolf for all your efforts. Like everyone, I hope this all gets fixed soon.

Please let me know if anyone can't see the images on the Livejournal site, though!

[RadPal]

Is it moving? I think it's moving.

I think the queue is moving.

Oh God.