[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

For the record we're not doing this to force you to pay for a special membership on the site. We've always had server busy messages when our servers hit a certain level. And that level has actually been increased not reduced since we introduced the premium membership service. But because there are not so many premium members we decided to let subscribers access the site at all-times (except during maintenance windows) as a bonus of their subscription.

Today the site was exceptionally busy we even broke the online users record. But we always aim to try and have the site available to you 99.99% of the time.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

BTW amanda. have you liked the Titanium membership idea??

If I answer this honestly now I wont be able to steal your idea later and take all the credit.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

Nor mine Choupi - it never happened until fairly recently for me - but now every single afternoon I've had that message for a couple of hours -and a lot today too :devil: Like you, I won't be coerced into paying money for membership (it's not the amount of money - it's the principle of it for me) - but the whole thing is driving me crazy :devil: And although I know they say they have increased the server capacity since membership started, I've definately seen a lot more member's names on-line earlier this year without any daft messages or computer "crashes" occuring So it actually feels like they have reduced the capacity to try and make us pay up, even though I'm prepared to accept this is not so if Amanada has said otherwise.

The first point I'd make are you looking at the actual numbers of people or just logged in users? Just the other day we broke the record online users, it even surpassed the record held by wtaworld.com. But more than 60% of those users were not logged in users.

As for crashes, we've absolutely suffered numerous problems during very busy periods simply because we didn't have the measures we have in place now that act as a safeguard. I recall several unfortunate outages during key moments at Grand Slams. These crashes usually resulted in days of desperate downtime where our tech team works 24x7 trying to restore the site to normal operation. We've managed to minimise the risk of these problems re-occuring by implementing the limiter on access.

We have increased the limit on connections since implementing the priority access for premium members - even if recent events lead to you believe otherwise. We continue to invest in upgrades as necessary and when we have the money available to undertake such work. We want everyone to be able to enjoy the site the same regardless of ability or desire to subscribe to a premium membership. And when I hear people are getting frustrated and upset by lack of capacity, it bothers me greatly and I definitely don't want anyone feeling they have no alternative but to pay for this reason alone.

I definitely hope we can get a handle on recent capacity problems soon so there's nobody who feels we're unworthy of $20 a year is ever tempted to pay. But the bottom line is MTF alone costs us many thousands of dollars a year alone to operate and that's just the very basic operating costs. So we have to try to be as creative as possible when solviing problems such as these as throwing alot money at the problem is hardly ever an option for us. Ultimately it means we cannot fix these things as quickly as some people would hope and expect.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

What should happen: the admins should encourage members who haven't posted anything to post. I believe they're the ones taking up the space.
Amanda, Gravity, if you read this, please consider deleting the membership of those who haven't posted on the forum and whose "account" is greater than 30 days old. If that's not possible, then a gentle reminder would do it.

Space isn't the issue. We have more than enough space to last us into the next decade. The issue is delivery of web pages and content to your computers. During extremely busy periods our servers start smoking and we have to let things cool for a few seconds/minutes before there's a huge explosion.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

I totally understand your pb but when you're referring to the famous crashes during the slams, it was bothering of course, but understandeable. And I don't remember ppl being annoyed about it, at least, not enough to post about it. The pb now that you've made the decision to limit access to premium members is that the pb happens every single day! It's been 1 week now, that every day, at the same time, I'm totally unable to log in. Frustration is understandeable...I hope that it can be fixed soon.

What we've done is disabled the server busy message for them as there's only a small number of premium members and it doesn't make any noticable difference to server load issues. And their contributions via subscriptions go directly towards upgrades that everyone benefits from. That is the only change we have made. And I feel it's very fair.

If you see a server busy message, chances are if you refresh within 30 seconds or so you'll be able to get straight back on. I understand it's not ideal but whole afternoons should not pass when all you see are busy messages. They should only be short moments when you can't get on.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

Just pay the $19.99 :lol: It's well worth it IMO.

Where else do you get so much entertainment for a whole year for so little money? Hell I spend more than 20 bucks on just one trip to the movies..... and I spend more time on here than I do watching movies.

Not only do you get priority access to the website during busy periods.
You get a totally ad-free experience.
You get loads of cool new skins to choose from.
You get double the vCash rewards for posting and blogging.
You get a monthly loyalty vCash bonus.
Faster webpages because all the crappy adcode is removed from the pages.
Custom usertitles.
You can do your own username changes.
You can have an image in your signature.
And you get a warm feeling knowing your 20 bucks is going towards keeping this great site up! :devil:

My commercial is over you get the point.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

Thanks for your personal commercial but still not interested.

Fair enough :lol:

Personally speaking though if this site didn't provide enough enjoyment for me to consider paying less than 6 cents a day to enjoy, I wouldn't be here nor would I be bothered by server busy messages one bit.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

So you're saying you need some better servers?

For non-paying members, there are ads and commercials on every page and these make the condition even worse as the page is busier than premium members. Am I correct here?

Not necessarily better servers but more of them. Probably now more than ever we need to add at least one or two more servers to our network. However now we're without a major sponsor behind us our financial situation just does not allow this kind of investment. But we're still working to try and find a solution.

The ads are served externally by our partners so they don't add to the server busy problems.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

We're currently looking to find an alternative billing company who can provide a service to customers from countries not accepted by Paypal. I'll post when this has been arranged and made available to you.

 

[wtn_amanda]

Re: Blame it to the Priority Access!!! And surrender to its power.....

I personally haven't gotten the message enough to be frustrated by it yet. But, I wonder if there isn't a way to restrict viewing to logged in users only during busy times; and if that change alone wouldn't eliminate most of these messages. You probably don't have to restrict to premium members only. If there are times when over 60% of those viewing are not logged in; by restricting access to logged in members,you could eliminate the looky-loos and leave room for those actually trying to contribute. Is that a possibility?

The more people you let on when loads are high on our servers the bigger the risks of a serious crash occuring. And if you suddenly have a flood of guests trying to login to their accounts to gain access to the site during perios, well you're going to create even more problems. It's a reasonable suggestion though and once we've tested out months ago on wtaworld without success.

We let premium members on because there's so few of them and it doesn't hurt the servers at all. They also deserve priority access since they are making a contribution to our investment pool. Money we use for upgrades that benefit everyone both ad-supported and paying members. Even if there were hundreds of premium members, it still wouldn't be a problem because we'd have that bigger budget to invest in significant upgrades to our network to support the increase in permanent access traffic..