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Date Posted: 17:08:50 06/18/00 Sun
Author: Brandon
Subject: Problems and Responses...

As you may have noticed, we have not been able to respond to many support questions -- I myself have been on a semi-leave of absence for a while, and I apologize. However, I would like to provide a bit of technical explanation, not regarding my personal life, but regarding VoyForums.

So first let me say that this is a personal post from me; so please take it as my own explanation, to help put you at ease, and not as a reflection on VoyForums as a whole -- we definitely want our users content, and are grateful to those of you who are understanding and patient.

After the new version of VoyForums went in, there remained some very perplexing bugs which I spent weeks-on-end attempting to find. It was difficult, time-consuming, and resulted only in random bug-fixes here or there, but some major problem remained and caused random errors which disturbed our normal bug-testing. This problem appeared to be a memory leak which I finally isolated down to some database library routines in the database we were using -- it was unfortunately not my own code for me to fix.

Upgrading to a new version would mean re-writing much of VoyForums' message-handling again, so we hesitated on doing that for it was still not clear where exactly the problem existed, nor how to recreate it (and we received little to no help from our users).

Eventually this problem led to the entire system being bogged down, and this completely prevented us from tracking down the problem, for the system was rendered unusable until the program eventually died and the system would return.

Finally we isolated the main database bug and attempted to find source from the original authors so we could fix it ourselves, and prevent from having to spend "forever" re-writing many portions of VoyForums. We were, however, unable to find this source, and were forced into upgrading, for the new database version was not compatible with the older versions. This meant we spent a long time re-coding large portions of VoyForums.

Finally, the new database libraries are in and seem to be functioning fine, but some of the corruption remains. Because of the system errors, though, other sections of the site would also not have the resources available to function properly, and this explains losts posts and unsalvagable message databases.

Now that the distracting database errors are out of the way, we will hopefully be able to make actual progress on bug-fixes (for it was difficult before, with unknown corruption affecting our tests).

I hope this at least explains a bit of what went on, technically.

...

Now, us handling VoyForums ourselves eliminates much of the beurocracy that could otherwise exist -- this allows us to freely add features our users' request and fix bugs, often on the fly, and put them online immediately. This is a minor trade-off, then, in that we do not always have the time to spend responding to you guys and providing support. Trust me though; we do not wish to neglect you guys, and we are very thankful to those of you who try to help out others when possible.

Now, regarding deleting posts in here. This is the support forum; this is not the street, nor is it the sidewalk in front of a government office for you to picket. Consider this more of a conversation spot in an office, which we liberally allow -- notice there is no anonymous "complaints box", but rather an open forum for support discussion. It is a very rare occasion that we would delete a post in here, and we do not even have this forum moderated (and, although we are going to be adding that feature, we do not know if we will be using it in the Support Forum).

As you can see, it is not high on our list to delete posts in here, even if we are tempted to do so, and there are some of you who even think we should delete more of the rant-posts. Do not let this liberty we allow -- even when disturbing to us -- let you feel we will tolerate any and all posts. We do delete random advertisements and carefully decide before deleting even those posts blatantly advertising other forum sites -- even those attempting to conceal it as posts of rebellion.

Now, be it noted that we also spent many hours trying to manually recover corrupt databases for our users, and coding new utilities for database recovery and error-correction with the new database libraries. We did not give up on any of them without a fight, but some databases ended up being casualties of war, and others martyrs. :( Forgive my symbolism.

Again, I apologize for my leave of absence, and I hope this letter is a sufficient explanation regarding VoyForums.

Lastly, I would like to say that, although we do not necessarily respond to the posts and e-mails, we do read them all. So please be patient while we fix some of the bugs that are still here and begin to work on features -- when we add them we will put notice in the News Forum. There are also a few of us who are working on compiling a FAQ -- we now have sufficient questions to post there. If any of you have some questions with answers you think will help out other users, please submit them to support@voy.com, it may help speed things up.

Take care, and thanks for your support. :)

Sincerely,
Brandon
VoyForums Staff

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Replies:

Re: Problems and Responses... -- :-), 18:37:17 06/18/00 Sun
- Re: Problems and Responses... -- Thank you., 19:57:31 06/18/00 Sun
Thanks, finally! -- Humpy, 23:23:51 06/18/00 Sun