It would be a thoughtful deed indeed if AS would notify all "Ready" snipers via eMail when there's a technical problem that places their snipes in jeopardy of not being placed.
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Impossible.
If we couldnt snipe it would most likely mean the database was down.
And if we cant get in the database, then we couldnt find out who had snipes. Nor could we find your email address because that's only stored in the database as well.
The best way to tell if you should manually snipe is if you cant get into our site. If you can get into our site, then we'll be sniping. We're down pretty rarely. Only a few times in the past year. Once for the internet worm in January, a week ago when a switch failed we were down about 1 hour solid, and intermittently for 2 hours before that as the piece of hardware burned out and finally died. Last time I can remember before that was sometime last June.
I'll move this thread to the suggestions forum in a couple days and we'll keep it in mind for an upgrade. We could probably have some sort of emergency warning system in case were to experience something that we thought might last more than a few hours.
Knock on wood!!!
If we couldnt snipe it would most likely mean the database was down.
And if we cant get in the database, then we couldnt find out who had snipes. Nor could we find your email address because that's only stored in the database as well.
The best way to tell if you should manually snipe is if you cant get into our site. If you can get into our site, then we'll be sniping. We're down pretty rarely. Only a few times in the past year. Once for the internet worm in January, a week ago when a switch failed we were down about 1 hour solid, and intermittently for 2 hours before that as the piece of hardware burned out and finally died. Last time I can remember before that was sometime last June.
I'll move this thread to the suggestions forum in a couple days and we'll keep it in mind for an upgrade. We could probably have some sort of emergency warning system in case were to experience something that we thought might last more than a few hours.
Knock on wood!!!
Sara,
Why not, then, create a backup file of all users and simply email all to alert of an outage? To snipers,
even a 30-minute outage may as well be eternity.
Given a chance, we can bid manually, or I could fall back on sniper software that I own.
Why not, then, create a backup file of all users and simply email all to alert of an outage? To snipers,
even a 30-minute outage may as well be eternity.
Given a chance, we can bid manually, or I could fall back on sniper software that I own.
Because that would be like Ford emailing everyone that has ever bought a car from them telling them their car might catch on fire, even though it's one one model, from one year, with certain serial numbers manufactured during a week week period for example.
We'd obviously not want to mail every customer, only those that may be effected. Thus we'd have to keep continually updating that list every few minutes.
As I said we'll put it in the suggestions. It's something that would take some effort to program and we'd need to balance that with how long it might take and what other sorts of things we could do in a similar amount of time and which is going to give the biggest benefit for the amount of time invested.
We'd obviously not want to mail every customer, only those that may be effected. Thus we'd have to keep continually updating that list every few minutes.
As I said we'll put it in the suggestions. It's something that would take some effort to program and we'd need to balance that with how long it might take and what other sorts of things we could do in a similar amount of time and which is going to give the biggest benefit for the amount of time invested.
What about posting a notification on this forum? I know it's not as sexy as everyone wants, but it wouldn't require any programming. Probably won't help that midnight snipe, but even this purposed email system, might still require something manual to start the process. For "really" important auctions, during daylight hours, I'd be willing to bring up this forum to see if everything was copasetic (I do anyway, but depend on other AS users). I wouldn't expect to always know in advance about a problem with AS, but even finding out about 1 would be better than none. I’m sure that others would complain if AS missed posting any down times, so that might stop AS from doing this.
Considering how infrequent it happens, if I was in charge of AS development, I'd skip it.
Considering how infrequent it happens, if I was in charge of AS development, I'd skip it.
quote:
What about posting a notification on this forum?
because often times if we're down this site isnt accessible. Plus people wouldnt know to check here. The list of emails would need to be stored remotely in a site not already at our main facility. That is the only way we could guarentee we'd be able to email people if our site was inaccessible. A good example was when the SQL Slammer internet worm hit in January. The colo facility we use was clogged head to toe with infected computers and computers trying to infect more computers just like tons of other places on the internet. Nothing could go in or out of the colo facility.
The best solution is to check our site. If you can get in it's working. If you cant then place your snipes manually. We will keep this as a suggested feature, but as I've shown it's not something trivial to program. To do it correctly and make it a truely useful feature would take a good bit of programming.