Help Keep The Site Going Strong

[iroken22]

Indeed Whoosh the reason reghcker hasnt been chatted to is because his posts were on topic. Thanks for understanding the statement i have made. Thank You!!!

 

[stueycaster]

Now if we can just get those that have decided to leave to come back we'll be doing fine. I hate to see these things happen but you know they always do. When you get this many people together someone's toes will get stepped on once in a while.

I'm glad we got the off topic thing squared away. Good going guys.

 

[jmanjeff]

No one in this post said that whoosh needed to stop his post but when you come here and it the New Post button and 50 % of the post are joke stuff ,or just plan dribble, try to cut back to 4 or 5 a day . I for one do not have to come here for help at lest not yet, but i do try and help when i can . And saying that we are using Whoosh as a way to leave because they are asking for help with cost that is just bull sh*t .

 

[Mike]

Again, use the reputation system and post any non-Windows stuff in The Water Cooler area....

 

[textureDnB]

Well. I did my homework and looked back. By helpful you are speaking in a broad sense? and not with computer technology? I could only find three actual contributions to "help" out of 1813.

You have stuey,s answer

Anyway, this all began with raising some issues, which have apparently turned against me. Whoosh is very obviously held in very high regard so I,ll leave you all to it. I have really enjoyed being on the site but I can see I am out of touch.

I concede the point about Whoosh i didn't go back and do that sort of research perhaps that was wrong of mei just felt as though i've seen his posts in other capacities. maybe i was confusing him with another poster. Ididn't mean to imply that either was a tech guru,but it appears I did since Stuey got the wrong impression as well, for that my apologies. Stueycaster certainly can be found all over this board offering whatever help he can. One doesn't even necessarily have to provide solutions to be helpful sometimes just stating the obvious or getting a poster to provide the right information can be helpful right?

My apologies for any hurt feelings or misinformation.

 

[davehc]

First of all, thanks to Mike for your work in addressing the server issues that were plaguing this site.
Second, I look at this from a different perspective. I see now that the hat is being passed, people are using Whoosh as an excuse to depart. Thats actually kind of sad. There is no criteria or requirements to belong here, so we all bring the experiences we have. Just because I have a degree in IT doesn't make Whoosh's experiences less valid than mine. I've seen him come into posts and learn from what others are doing. That enables him to then lend his new found knowledge to others. If theres concern over the watercooler size, then purge after fewer days. But to use Whoosh and his points as an excuse.....that's wrong. I feel sorry for Mike in a way...all of this whining,............ man up!
You'll have my contribution when I get home.

A parting remark.
I have no issues with Whoosh, other than those stated. I was thefirst to step in in the inflamed thread regarding his dismissal, and indicate this was NOT the intention of anyone but the OP.

I have had several issues with the site, the main being the constant absence of an Administrator, a very necessary feature of any site such s this. Yes, to use your word, I have descended into the category of "whining" and it has become another reason for my decision. I do feel that there is no longer much useful input and, as all have gathered, I am sure this is because an impression has been gained of late, with, again, the water cooler as a contributing factor, and the list of robot acquired news items, that this may not be a help site in the known sense, but more of a chat site. Yes. I am whining again, but felt I needed to point out, as I said, and in agreement, that whoosh is not a singular reason for abandoning the site. Looking back, I THINK I am the only poteential "leaver" who has been connected with the "Whoosh " name.

 

[Mike]

I find it odd that you say I am absent when I have been working towards the site day and night. Most of the time this is behind the scenes. If there is something that is needed, please let me know. You claim I am not here, yet I check the site all the time. My role changed from communicating a lot to making sure things always work. For example, you are probably not aware that there is an e-mail problem that I have been looking into all day. I will also be having a very serious surgery next week, but I will still check the forums. On the topic of "whoosh", I believe this has gone on long enough and will close the thread since it is straying off topic. The matter at hand is that the site has outgrown its original clothes and I am looking into ways to improve that situation.

The reason for the "Valued Contributor" award is true -- people who make this many posts to the site are valid contributors. Whether or not you dislike what they are saying is subjective, but the very fact that they have made X amount of posts indicates that they are contributors nonetheless, and valued by this site nonetheless. (If they had made 500 or 1000 useless posts they would likely have been banned, thus not earning the title.)

I was hoping this would not turn into a flame/complaint fest. Can we focus on constructive criticism? I am willing to answer anyone. Right now I am testing our e-mail system for registrations and PMs, but a lot of the work I do is unfortunately alone. I have reached out in the past for people to contact me via IM or phone but never has one staff member done so. I continue to manage many tasks at once and this may not be as simple as you think. A site that gets this many hits becomes more difficult to manage every day.

 

[davehc]

I find it odd that you say I am absent when I have been working towards the site day and night. Most of the time this is behind the scenes. If there is something that is needed, please let me know. You claim I am not here, yet I check the site all the time. My role changed from communicating a lot to making sure things always work. For example, you are probably not aware that there is an e-mail problem that I have been looking into all day. I will also be having a very serious surgery next week, but I will still check the forums. On the topic of "whoosh", I believe this has gone on long enough and will close the thread since it is straying off topic. The matter at hand is that the site has outgrown its original clothes and I am looking into ways to improve that situation.

The reason for the "Valued Contributor" award is true -- people who make this many posts to the site are valid contributors. Whether or not you dislike what they are saying is subjective, but the very fact that they have made X amount of posts indicates that they are contributors nonetheless, and valued by this site nonetheless. (If they had made 500 or 1000 useless posts they would likely have been banned, thus not earning the title.)

I was hoping this would not turn into a flame/complaint fest. Can we focus on constructive criticism? I am willing to answer anyone. Right now I am testing our e-mail system for registrations and PMs, but a lot of the work I do is unfortunately alone. I have reached out in the past for people to contact me via IM or phone but never has one staff member done so. I continue to manage many tasks at once and this may not be as simple as you think. A site that gets this many hits becomes more difficult to manage every day.

"Behind the scenes" Whilst you may regard your role as mainly as "making sure things work", they did not, from around April the site suffered severe slowdowns. I am intelligent enough to realise there could have been a server problem, but your communication was sparse. I feel quite a lot of the aggravation felt would have been stopped in it's tracks by such. As a very recent instance, why would you post this in the "Staff" forum an hour ago. With basically, at the moment, only three, rarely four, contributors there, it is hardly reaching out!
:quote
"Anyone who is pissed about the latest changes can vent here. So far the server hasn't become sluggish, but then again we haven't hit the 1000 user mark in awhile.... I'm looking to still host @ home (crazy) or upgrade the server. I am sorry the awards system is still gone it just eats up too many resources right now.
Thanks,
Mike"

The exchanges in the "Forum announcements" , regarding an Email problem, did not escape my attention, in fact, you may not have noticed, but I did respond and remark on my own feeling toward the facility.
I am in total agreement about the Whoosh" thing. The only person who could sort this out now would be himself.

P.S. With sincerity. I am sorry about your surgery, and I hope it all goes well.

 

[Mike]

It is possible to make it so posts to non-related Windows forums don't even count towards the total post count, but I wasn't going to go crazy on that... I don't see what the problem here is. Are you dealing with other issues outside the forum, or are you suffering from IT burnout? I am seriously asking this question since you seem to be quite irate, and your comments seem to be quite irrational.

 

[RAK]

"irate" Possibly. Obviously Dave has a bee in his bonnet regarding the use, or misuse, according to your views, of the watercooler. " Irrational". Which part of his posts indicated that. I found the posts quite informative and far from irrational.

Anyway. The easy way out is to close the thread(s) relating to complaints about Whoosh or the Water cooler, and start over.

 

[iroken22]

irate" Possibly. Obviously Dave has a bee in his bonnet regarding the use, or misuse, according to your views, of the watercooler. " Irrational". Which part of his posts indicated that. I found the posts quite informative and far from irrational.

Anyway. The easy way out is to close the thread(s) relating to complaints about Whoosh or the Water cooler, and start over

RAK davehc comments are not quite irate but are still in a way rude. Mike had been working 24/7 on transferring the site over to new servers. davehc new he had been doing this for sometime. It doesnt take a day or a week to complete this task. So guys please hang low and give Mike a little room.
​

 

[Mike]

We are now running on an I7 virtualized with 8GB of RAM. Congrats to everyone who made it this far in the last couple hours. On Thursday the upload throughput will also be upgraded. I will be working to slowly restore some features that have been lost in this transition.

Update: I'd like to apologize for the extended downtime. This was due to issues with memcache which should improve the speed of the forum even further!

 

[Mike]

I have strangely been working on the site for hours. My main goal was to restore all of the features, but I also ran into the problem of the /tmp folder running out of space in Linux and a number of other issues that did arise. During my hours of working on this site (which I somehow find to be enjoyable -- we are talking hours upon hours here at this point), I think we have everything straightened out. If you had any idea how I have combined both sites and have the hardware working now, you would scream. It is a crazy set up and I'm not sure most people have attempted it before, but it does seem to be quite stable.

WinVistaForums.com is now part of this site. Eventually it will disappear off the search engines, but there seemed to be a lack of interest in the site in general. It lives on now as part of this site with hopefully all members converted.

What is really important is that if you notice any strange effects on the site please let me know here. I will be gone for the next 2 days or more due to medical problems, but... it looks like the site is going strong.

Thank you to reghackr and john for donating to the website. It is greatly appreciated.

 

[Radenight]

Mike I want to take this opportunity to thank you for all the work you have done and are doing to manage this forum. I've said it before but I'll say it again, this is definitely the best Windows 7 forum around in my opinion! I also want to say that I think your doing your job as Administrator perfectly..

I think the addition of Donations is a very good idea.. I will be making mine within the next few days.

As for everything else in this thread, I am sorry to hear that your leaving us Davehc, though we didn't always agree on things I feel your leaving will be a very substantial loss but I wish you all the best..

I'm done with the whole "Whoosh" thing and the whole "Water Cooler" thing. I'm sure some of you noticed my absence in the last few days. That was mainly because I was sick of reading nothing but childish whining and rediculiously unwarranted arguments. So rather then contribute to these uneccessary things any longer I took a "mini-vacation" from this forum. But I am back and ready to get back to work. I hope things will finally iron out now and we can move on from this little "conflict"..

 

[Mike]

The work continues as we speak.... as it seems to be some individuals may not get their post count back as their posts have been turned to "Guest" with their name next to it. This is due to the migration from WinVistaForums.com and there is noway to go back from that (even with multiple snapshots the amount of posts and registrations lost was too much -- not to mention everytime I restore a snapshot of the system state the entire system crashes). Thank you and please have patience. The reality is some people may choose to leave because of these problems. The answer to that is: Oh well. Noone put a gun to your head to stay here. But thanks for visiting.

UPDATE post SET userid='xxx' WHERE username='Old Name';

 

[loathe]

The reality is some people may choose to leave because of these problems. The answer to that is: Oh well. Noone put a gun to your head to stay here. But thanks for visiting.

I'm done with the whole "Whoosh" thing and the whole "Water Cooler" thing. I'm sure some of you noticed my absence in the last few days. That was mainly because I was sick of reading nothing but childish whining and rediculiously unwarranted arguments. So rather then contribute to these uneccessary things any longer I took a "mini-vacation" from this forum. But I am back and ready to get back to work. I hope things will finally iron out now and we can move on from this little "conflict"..


sigh

 

[john3347]

Some understand, some may not

Mike, this is just to let you that some of us have at least a vague idea what it takes to manage a site like this from a home environment and we are being patient knowing that you are going beyond reasonable in your efforts to keep things "rolling". Just know that, while you are pulling your hair out trying to get things straightened out and running smooth, the "silent majority" is being patient and not raising a ruckus about the problems that you know about all too well. Maybe in time, after things get all ironed out the few that are loudly voicing complaints will dwindle back. I, for one, get much more technical information from this site than I am able to contribute and some of the information has come from those who do not demonstrate as much patience as some others. We need them all.

I hope I said all this so everybody understands.

 

[Mike]

Re: Some understand, some may not

This thread was re-opened for further discussion. Thanks, everyone.

 

[whoosh]

Re: Some understand, some may not

Fond memories ...." Beam me up Scotty !"

 

[stueycaster]

Re: Some understand, some may not

Countless people have found answers to their computer problems here. This site is awesome. Thanks Mike.