That's a load of bull, and I'm absolutely amazed you'd make such a statement Andy. There are free, open-source products out there (like www.sympa.org) that can be used to host and manage mailing lists with thousands of addresses in it, which can be run on a generic server. It's certainly within the ability of SM staff to send out a notification when the site's down and another when it's back up.
Hi, sorry - 50,000 posts later I don't BS - I'm sorry you took it that way.
Sending emails would cause an undue burden on our system and all of us, who would be better served by fixing the problem and dealing with in-the-moment questions from customers.
We do work very hard at keeping our status blog updated.
I'm sorry I upset you.
ETA: Of course, yes, technically - we can send mails. But we're choosing to notify by other means. Thanks.
That's a load of bull, and I'm absolutely amazed you'd make such a statement Andy. There are free, open-source products out there (like www.sympa.org) that can be used to host and manage mailing lists with thousands of addresses in it, which can be run on a generic server. It's certainly within the ability of SM staff to send out a notification when the site's down and another when it's back up.
Do you have any idea how long it would take to email all their subscribers? Likely, it would take longer than the event lasts...
It's called RSS feeds. If you add their status blog RSS feed to your favorite reader (like google reader), you can get an email alert immediately on new events. It's not too hard.
All seems fine now.
Hope this was just a bad week.
I do thank the good folks at Smugmug for their good service and product.
Thanks so much for the kind words. We're sick about the downtime and what it meant to you and so many others, so we're busy with our internal post-mortems.
My own view may be different from others at SmugMug, but I'll share fwiw. I believe that when you have a site with lots of traffic and you make big changes to it, you enter a window of vulnerability. This week was tough for YouTube wrt downtime as well because they're making significant changes that were hard to test at scale before going live with them.
I've been concerned for a few months about some of the big changes we've made with features like collections, smart galleries and packages, which touch a lot of areas of the site.
No excuses, the problems are from our own mistakes and I'm not implying that because YouTube, which is giant, went down it's somehow okay for us to go down. But my perspective is that I suspect the timing of these issues is linked to the bigger changes we've made to our site lately.
ETA: Of course, yes, technically - we can send mails. But we're choosing to notify by other means. Thanks.
Maybe I missed it-- but is SM on Twitter? Seems like a speedier way to offer updates than email.
Of course, then people would complain they don't use twitter so they didn't see the info. * sigh * I'm guess SM is doing the best you can with your resources.
But back to my original question-- do you offer updates via twitter?
EDIT: nevermind... just found you on twitter
BTW: just my two-cents, but SM customers looking for a more efficient notification system for SM updates and issues should consider using twitter.
Maybe I missed it-- but is SM on Twitter? Seems like a speedier way to offer updates than email.
Of course, then people would complain they don't use twitter so they didn't see the info. * sigh * I'm guess SM is doing the best you can with your resources.
But back to my original question-- do you offer updates via twitter?
Hi, sorry - 50,000 posts later I don't BS - I'm sorry you took it that way.
Sending emails would cause an undue burden on our system and all of us, who would be better served by fixing the problem and dealing with in-the-moment questions from customers.
We do work very hard at keeping our status blog updated.
I'm sorry I upset you.
ETA: Of course, yes, technically - we can send mails. But we're choosing to notify by other means. Thanks.
We have _got_ be talking about different things - because the amount of time it would take to send something to a mail server isn't much more than the amount of time it would take to post something to dgrin.
* 1 person writes an email and hits "send",
* The server responds with a request for approval email,
* The person responds with an approval,
* The mail server would handle the rest.
A few minutes of one person's time tops.
A site with your kind of server horsepower and bandwidth could easily able to handle the transmission side of sending the mailing out.
And yes - I know you choose other means to send out notifications. That that choice involves "pull" instead of "push"' technology on the part of your customers is part of the problem and why you have been and will continue to get grief from your customers for your lack of communication.
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And yes - I know you choose other means to send out notifications. That that choice involves "pull" instead of "push"' technology on the part of your customers is part of the problem and why you have been and will continue to get grief from your customers for your lack of communication.
I thank you for your passionate feedback, Tim. Ironically, just a week or so ago, we were called out for over-communicating on email, dgrin, twitter and facebook.
We have _got_ be talking about different things - because the amount of time it would take to send something to a mail server isn't much more than the amount of time it would take to post something to dgrin.
* 1 person writes an email and hits "send",
* The server responds with a request for approval email,
* The person responds with an approval,
* The mail server would handle the rest.
A few minutes of one person's time tops.
A site with your kind of server horsepower and bandwidth could easily able to handle the transmission side of sending the mailing out.
And yes - I know you choose other means to send out notifications. That that choice involves "pull" instead of "push"' technology on the part of your customers is part of the problem and why you have been and will continue to get grief from your customers for your lack of communication.
It would also be very simple to create a google group for the status updates that we could subscribe to if desired.
I thank you for your passionate feedback, Tim. Ironically, just a week or so ago, we were called out for over-communicating on email, dgrin, twitter and facebook.
I'd take that as a sign you're doing something right!
Given a choice between over-communicating and under-communicating, I'd take over-communicating every time. Reading the same material from a number of sources is a lot less annoying compared to not finding out something mission critical has gone down. No customer of a service provider should find out something's not working from their customers - they need to find out from their service provider so they can take pro-active action to deal with the inevitable fallout they're going to run into.
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The numbers in the link look to agree with other sites assessments of acceptable website uptime - 99.8% for large company business critical sites, including maintenance downtime (yes they are selling monitoring services, but seem to be realistic in telling their customers what they can expect). SM may not hit that but it's a great goal, they should come close - we hope.
T-1 lines from Telco carry a 99.99% or even five 9s uptime, and that's been the standard for years there. But even they go down, however when they do the dust flies until it's resolved, and clients with SLAs get compensation. I wonder if SM has an SLA with their Internet service provider and what's the expected uptime?
Wasn't one of the other photo hosting sites down for four or five days sometime in the last several months?
I remember Redbubble.com being frequently down. As a non-paid service, what they originally provided during system down time was an 'Oops!' screen with a youtube video of the opening theme of Playschool (as a sign of their humour). Risking having a client see a playschool segment instead of your site, and their non-reliability with down-time was a major reason why I switched to SM, and for the more professional layout. So far, SM has provided a much better service, except for yesterday, and odd moments once or twice a month that I've come across.
If a site down screen for public access viewing could be guaranteed to appear each time the system is down or undergoing maintenance, with the exception of yesterday, and for SM users with their own URLs, that would go a long way towards making me and probably quite a few other members much happier about continuing with SM.
I thank you for your passionate feedback, Tim. Ironically, just a week or so ago, we were called out for over-communicating on email, dgrin, twitter and facebook.
As the one who called you out on "overcommunicating", I think you've taken that very much out of context. What I said was that you were openly encouraging people to follow multiple Twitter accounts and multiple facebook accounts and then putting some of the same information on all of them and you were offering us no guidance on where to go for what. As a result, if I followed your advice, I was getting 3-5 copies of some pieces of information (with facebook, twitter, email, homepage msgs and pro and regular versions of some things). I viewed it as quite unorganized at the time.
I actually think you were trying to do something good and get your communication in all these places (which I have no problem with), but I think in your zeal you didn't really think through what was going to be communicated where and how one could figure out what they should actually subscribe to in order to get the right information and only one copy of it.
So, I asked you to please clarify what information would go where so we could figure out what we should actually sign up for. I wasn't asking you to communicate less - I was asking you to be organized about it and to be clear to us about how we get what kinds of information and how we avoid get many copies of the same stuff.
As to the other requests in this thread for more information, I have no problem with additional opt-in ways to get communication (e.g. a google group for email) as long as Smugmug is clear about what information will be communicated there and how it relates to the information communicated other places so we can all make an informed decision on which channels of information to subscribe to and as long as Smugmug keeps it organized in a fashion that we can understand.
Be clear. Be organized. Be consistent. Make it possible to get everything of interest without having to get a zillion copies of the same info spread across a bunch of channels. My previous communication objections were about these four points.
As the one who called you out on "overcommunicating", I think you've taken that very much out of context. What I said was that you were openly encouraging people to follow multiple Twitter accounts and multiple facebook accounts and then putting some of the same information on all of them and you were offering us no guidance on where to go for what. As a result, if I followed your advice, I was getting 3-5 copies of some pieces of information (with facebook, twitter, email, homepage msgs and pro and regular versions of some things). I viewed it as quite unorganized at the time.
I actually think you were trying to do something good and get your communication in all these places (which I have no problem with), but I think in your zeal you didn't really think through what was going to be communicated where and how one could figure out what they should actually subscribe to in order to get the right information and only one copy of it.
So, I asked you to please clarify what information would go where so we could figure out what we should actually sign up for. I wasn't asking you to communicate less - I was asking you to be organized about it and to be clear to us about how we get what kinds of information and how we avoid get many copies of the same stuff.
As to the other requests in this thread for more information, I have no problem with additional opt-in ways to get communication (e.g. a google group for email) as long as Smugmug is clear about what information will be communicated there and how it relates to the information communicated other places so we can all make an informed decision on which channels of information to subscribe to and as long as Smugmug keeps it organized in a fashion that we can understand.
Be clear. Be organized. Be consistent. Make it possible to get everything of interest without having to get a zillion copies of the same info spread across a bunch of channels. My previous communication objections were about these four points.
I think the problem is that not everyone will use the same system. There was already a question here about twitter so we know someone wants that. Another wants emails to be sent to every single member,others may want facebook but its just not easy getting everyone to look at the same place. Some people would find it a burdon and soon say they want other options. If your getting the same information from each area then you know you just have to pick the one you like and roll with it.
Give a better SmugStatus page a la Amazon S3, available to everyone, and then let those that want Twitter, SmugBlog, feeds, etc. choose to get information that way.
I think the problem is that not everyone will use the same system. There was already a question here about twitter so we know someone wants that. Another wants emails to be sent to every single member,others may want facebook but its just not easy getting everyone to look at the same place. Some people would find it a burdon and soon say they want other options. If your getting the same information from each area then you know you just have to pick the one you like and roll with it.
On your control panel there's a setting where SM asks for permission to send information to your email address.
This email address should be on a mailing list where information of importance - like down time, new product roll-outs, and other similarly important issues - should be pushed out.
If SM wants to confine their notices to an RSS feed - they need to provide an easy way for people to set something up to get notified from that feed, or better yet give them a button to press on SM which'll do it for them.
As for the other channels - I have no problem with them having duplicate information, or have a brief announcement with a pointer to some centralized location for more information.
Better yet - hire a specialist in communications.
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^
Agreed. Email notices for critical issues should be distributed.
R. Leonardo www.RobArtPhoto.com Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
Andy is doing fine I believe. The heat is fairly generalized on performance issues, not Andy issues.:):
R. Leonardo www.RobArtPhoto.com Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
Hi, sorry - 50,000 posts later I don't BS - I'm sorry you took it that way.
Sending emails would cause an undue burden on our system and all of us, who would be better served by fixing the problem and dealing with in-the-moment questions from customers.
We do work very hard at keeping our status blog updated.
I'm sorry I upset you.
ETA: Of course, yes, technically - we can send mails. But we're choosing to notify by other means. Thanks.
I agree w/ Andy, I subscribe to the twitter feeds and find that is as immediate as I need (many times I check my twitter feeds on my phone before I check email).
There appears to be a misconception that downtime only happens to smugmug and going somewhere else is going to make your pages magically up all the time. This simply isn't true. Smugmug did have some downtime, in fact its a pretty large amount by most peoples standards although in reality by internet standards I find it really was not that bad. Ive had much worst including from my internet provider who then says "whoops this is day 15 bummer, were working on it" then you have to call them again to remind them.
Id be willing to bet that every worker at smugmug was hard on this issue and I'm sure it was tense and frustrating. However, I would still be willing to bet that they were all working on it! Not going home until it is fixed and probably having food delivered right to their office because there was no time to waste because they pride themselves on working for you. Some are talking about "you'll have to convince me to stay" and the thing is they will actually try! Many other companies would just say "oh its just a few people, thats acceptable losses" but in my experience smugmug won't. They have some odd crazy ability to stay calm in the face of catastrophic failure and then turn around and say "we screwed up, what can we do to convince you we love all our customers?" How many other companies would do that?
Don't just imagine that things should work perfectly, they are trying to constantly implement the things that "we" ask for! Sometimes that is going to cause errors but its a complex system and thats just the reality of things. So you didn't post your ebay gear and you consider that money "lost" but you still have your product and can post it as soon as the site had returned, you havent really lost anything. Some did lose money, your hoping that your customers have some faith in you and return to purchase. If your site is down then your relying on your past reliability and your previous business relations with that customer, that is what smugmug is doing as well.
I don't think smugmug is a mom and pop but I would rather have their small business personal service attitude then that of a walmart or yahoo. I think they are keeping affordable prices and giving amazing service. Yahoo's flickr is $24 a year for a pro account and they are huge. Its because they act like real people that I like it here so much.
I suppose I could go on but in reality there is probably not much point. I talk in such a way because I have had the chance to work with these guys, to spend time with them and get a real idea of how they do business and to me its worth more then a few hours of downtime.
Thanks so much for the kind words. We're sick about the downtime and what it meant to you and so many others, so we're busy with our internal post-mortems.
My own view may be different from others at SmugMug, but I'll share fwiw. I believe that when you have a site with lots of traffic and you make big changes to it, you enter a window of vulnerability. This week was tough for YouTube wrt downtime as well because they're making significant changes that were hard to test at scale before going live with them.
I've been concerned for a few months about some of the big changes we've made with features like collections, smart galleries and packages, which touch a lot of areas of the site.
No excuses, the problems are from our own mistakes and I'm not implying that because YouTube, which is giant, went down it's somehow okay for us to go down. But my perspective is that I suspect the timing of these issues is linked to the bigger changes we've made to our site lately.
Re: Especially this:
... We're sick about the downtime ...
In case it's not apparent to Smugmug's great staff, whenever a staff member at any level makes a comment like this, Smugmug overall reputation becomes that much more endearing. Honesty and shared pain does more to encourage others' commitment and investment in your services. I so appreciate these kinds of comments. Thanks.
Comments
Sending emails would cause an undue burden on our system and all of us, who would be better served by fixing the problem and dealing with in-the-moment questions from customers.
We do work very hard at keeping our status blog updated.
I'm sorry I upset you.
ETA: Of course, yes, technically - we can send mails. But we're choosing to notify by other means. Thanks.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
It's called RSS feeds. If you add their status blog RSS feed to your favorite reader (like google reader), you can get an email alert immediately on new events. It's not too hard.
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Funny thing is that I dont buy that brand of milk or shop at that store again. Im glad it doesnt appear that Smugmug has the same beliefs as you.
My own view may be different from others at SmugMug, but I'll share fwiw. I believe that when you have a site with lots of traffic and you make big changes to it, you enter a window of vulnerability. This week was tough for YouTube wrt downtime as well because they're making significant changes that were hard to test at scale before going live with them.
I've been concerned for a few months about some of the big changes we've made with features like collections, smart galleries and packages, which touch a lot of areas of the site.
No excuses, the problems are from our own mistakes and I'm not implying that because YouTube, which is giant, went down it's somehow okay for us to go down. But my perspective is that I suspect the timing of these issues is linked to the bigger changes we've made to our site lately.
Maybe I missed it-- but is SM on Twitter? Seems like a speedier way to offer updates than email.
Of course, then people would complain they don't use twitter so they didn't see the info. * sigh * I'm guess SM is doing the best you can with your resources.
But back to my original question-- do you offer updates via twitter?
EDIT: nevermind... just found you on twitter
BTW: just my two-cents, but SM customers looking for a more efficient notification system for SM updates and issues should consider using twitter.
Portland, Oregon Photographer Pete Springer
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@SmugMug
@SmugMugPro
@SmugMugStatus
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* 1 person writes an email and hits "send",
* The server responds with a request for approval email,
* The person responds with an approval,
* The mail server would handle the rest.
A few minutes of one person's time tops.
A site with your kind of server horsepower and bandwidth could easily able to handle the transmission side of sending the mailing out.
And yes - I know you choose other means to send out notifications. That that choice involves "pull" instead of "push"' technology on the part of your customers is part of the problem and why you have been and will continue to get grief from your customers for your lack of communication.
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That response is the only reason you still have a chance at keeping my business and I imagine many others too.
http://plusdave.com
Given a choice between over-communicating and under-communicating, I'd take over-communicating every time. Reading the same material from a number of sources is a lot less annoying compared to not finding out something mission critical has gone down. No customer of a service provider should find out something's not working from their customers - they need to find out from their service provider so they can take pro-active action to deal with the inevitable fallout they're going to run into.
T-1 lines from Telco carry a 99.99% or even five 9s uptime, and that's been the standard for years there. But even they go down, however when they do the dust flies until it's resolved, and clients with SLAs get compensation. I wonder if SM has an SLA with their Internet service provider and what's the expected uptime?
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/04/27/62-percent-of-airline-websites-not-as-reliable-as-they-should-be/
I remember Redbubble.com being frequently down. As a non-paid service, what they originally provided during system down time was an 'Oops!' screen with a youtube video of the opening theme of Playschool (as a sign of their humour). Risking having a client see a playschool segment instead of your site, and their non-reliability with down-time was a major reason why I switched to SM, and for the more professional layout. So far, SM has provided a much better service, except for yesterday, and odd moments once or twice a month that I've come across.
If a site down screen for public access viewing could be guaranteed to appear each time the system is down or undergoing maintenance, with the exception of yesterday, and for SM users with their own URLs, that would go a long way towards making me and probably quite a few other members much happier about continuing with SM.
I actually think you were trying to do something good and get your communication in all these places (which I have no problem with), but I think in your zeal you didn't really think through what was going to be communicated where and how one could figure out what they should actually subscribe to in order to get the right information and only one copy of it.
So, I asked you to please clarify what information would go where so we could figure out what we should actually sign up for. I wasn't asking you to communicate less - I was asking you to be organized about it and to be clear to us about how we get what kinds of information and how we avoid get many copies of the same stuff.
As to the other requests in this thread for more information, I have no problem with additional opt-in ways to get communication (e.g. a google group for email) as long as Smugmug is clear about what information will be communicated there and how it relates to the information communicated other places so we can all make an informed decision on which channels of information to subscribe to and as long as Smugmug keeps it organized in a fashion that we can understand.
Be clear. Be organized. Be consistent. Make it possible to get everything of interest without having to get a zillion copies of the same info spread across a bunch of channels. My previous communication objections were about these four points.
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I think the problem is that not everyone will use the same system. There was already a question here about twitter so we know someone wants that. Another wants emails to be sent to every single member,others may want facebook but its just not easy getting everyone to look at the same place. Some people would find it a burdon and soon say they want other options. If your getting the same information from each area then you know you just have to pick the one you like and roll with it.
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This email address should be on a mailing list where information of importance - like down time, new product roll-outs, and other similarly important issues - should be pushed out.
If SM wants to confine their notices to an RSS feed - they need to provide an easy way for people to set something up to get notified from that feed, or better yet give them a button to press on SM which'll do it for them.
As for the other channels - I have no problem with them having duplicate information, or have a brief announcement with a pointer to some centralized location for more information.
Better yet - hire a specialist in communications.
Agreed. Email notices for critical issues should be distributed.
www.RobArtPhoto.com
Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
I'd like to say....mate keep your chin up. I reckon you've done a great job and some responses must have tested your patience thats for sure.
Thanks Andy for your help and input.
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www.RobArtPhoto.com
Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
I agree w/ Andy, I subscribe to the twitter feeds and find that is as immediate as I need (many times I check my twitter feeds on my phone before I check email).
Nikon | Private Photojournalist
Beautifully said, thank you.
Re: Especially this:
In case it's not apparent to Smugmug's great staff, whenever a staff member at any level makes a comment like this, Smugmug overall reputation becomes that much more endearing. Honesty and shared pain does more to encourage others' commitment and investment in your services. I so appreciate these kinds of comments. Thanks.