HEY! First Light....I've gotta vent...

[Nickajack Angler]

I've been a member of this website since Dec of last year and have been an active contributor and member. I hope I add a fraction of the value to this site that others have to me and my families fishing life. However, it has become glaringly obvious that the hosting of this site has become less and less in quality than it was when I first joined. I realize it's free and we ARE thankful for it's service to us all, but companies are paying for access to us, their audience who spend our hard earned dollars buying their services and products.
Now, I am not talking bad about ANY of the staff/moderators, they are AWESOME and are an invaluable resource to all of us, but since your taking over this website, the load times, error messages, and other "glitches" have increased and truly contributed to my personal decline in participation due to loss of interest when I am unable to open my inbox, encounter repeated errors opening posts/forums, replying to posts, and just plain old reading the forum. Please help inform us of what you are doing to remedy this. Many people have commented politely and thrown out questions as to why this is happening, and to my knowledge there has been more speculation than a response for a reason to this. Here's a great opportunity to share some reasons and efforts being taken to alleviate some of these issues. Disk space is cheap these days and I'm pretty sure if DHaun could do it from his basement with such apparent ease and value/cost approach, it shouldn't be hard for a company with your amount of sponsorship to maintain a seamless web experience. I'm on broadband and have a sweet computer running.... What's UP!?!?!?!
There's my vent. Forgive me if I am overstepping, but I'm frustrated coming here lately....

 

[craazyboutbass]

It is taking a long time to load every page on here! Definatley not like before.

 

[Buoy-Master]

Nickajack Angler - 5/28/2008 6:12 PM I've been a member of this website since Dec of last year and have been an active contributor and member. I hope I add a fraction of the value to this site that others have to me and my families fishing life. However, it has become glaringly obvious that the hosting of this site has become less and less in quality than it was when I first joined. I realize it's free and we ARE thankful for it's service to us all, but companies are paying for access to us, their audience who spend our hard earned dollars buying their services and products. Now, I am not talking bad about ANY of the staff/moderators, they are AWESOME and are an invaluable resource to all of us, but since your taking over this website, the load times, error messages, and other "glitches" have increased and truly contributed to my personal decline in participation due to loss of interest when I am unable to open my inbox, encounter repeated errors opening posts/forums, replying to posts, and just plain old reading the forum. Please help inform us of what you are doing to remedy this. Many people have commented politely and thrown out questions as to why this is happening, and to my knowledge there has been more speculation than a response for a reason to this. Here's a great opportunity to share some reasons and efforts being taken to alleviate some of these issues. Disk space is cheap these days and I'm pretty sure if DHaun could do it from his basement with such apparent ease and value/cost approach, it shouldn't be hard for a company with your amount of sponsorship to maintain a seamless web experience. I'm on broadband and have a sweet computer running.... What's UP!?!?!?! There's my vent. Forgive me if I am overstepping, but I'm frustrated coming here lately....

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[2jigs]

Me too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Guest]

i absolutley agree i dont even care to log on, because it has turned into to such a hassle and inconvienence.......but still no reponses once agian.

 

[Buoy-Master]

I posted an update in the announcement area...I'm doing all I can guys. </p>

Dont expect a post from me for another 50 seconds....it takes it tha long on my end to submit!!

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[Guest]

Guys it will take the folks that advertise here to open the eyes of First Light. We can vent and complain all we want and maybe,hopefully it will do some good. No matter what we say though it will not carry near as much wieght as when some of the advertisers complain. If something is not done soon our numbers will drop if they have not already. Then the great folks that pay for us to see their ads will fall as well.

 

[Guest]

NA, I agree with you whole hearedly, the site sucks big time all the time, anytime you click on anything it takes forever to get it to pullup, the site is slower than mollasses in North Dakota in Feb. I know the moderators can't do much except complain like us. They are doing a fine job with what they have to work with. I do believe they First Light could find a faster server somewhere. It is getting so I don't want to fight the wait times to try and even read the posts. When I do post I click submit and wait and wait then I can't remember if I hit submit or not and finally I get a repeat message on what I was posting. The site sucks, sucks, sucks, and sucks big time, did i say that the site sucks?

 

[theangler]

Hello,
There is a lot said in this post so I will do my best to answer as throughly as possible.

I have personally spoke with mod/admins on the site about this issue and related that we are working on this and frankly am a bit frustrated as well because we are frankly not able to find any consistent load time issues. We have consulted with programmers of the code this site was written on, the hosting company who hosts and others. Below are some of their comments.

"Dear Customer,
In addition to testing using a third party network, I tested using a third party web based performance tool and had good results. I have included a link for you below. "

"Dear Mr. Hodgdon,
I was able to access your site without issue. Please elaborate on the issue you are having.
Please let us know if you have any other questions."

"the site seems very responsive to me as far as navigating and reading posts."

and others...

I realize this is frustrating but I would encourage users having problems to PM, email or call (www.firstlightnet.com) with any information related to when they have a problem and what happened as oppose to posting it here so that we can better isolate the issues.

This being said, clearly there is an issue and we are working on isolating the problem and fixing it. In regards to comments about "disk space" and "how things have been since FLN acquired the site, we are committed to providing quality websites and have an 11 year track record for not cutting financial corners that effect users web site experience. if it was as simple as buying hardware we would have already done that.

Some of our options to improve load time require a few hours down time for the site and we were saving those for last resort, but may have to go that route. i will keep you posted and apologize for the troubles.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your work Mike. We know that you want the site to work as much or more than we do.

 

[TritonCarl]

my 2 cents......

one thing i have noticed is the difference in looking at the site from work and at home. honestly, at home i have no problem looking at or loading anything, but work is a different story. one difference is i don't have to click on the picture to get to the forums(i have to at home) and i noticed at work it comes up as the tennessee & chattanooga fishing forums. and it seems to me the only way i can get the list of forums to pull up at work is i have to click on forums and then they eventually come up. i'm not sure why i get 2 different results and was wondering am i the only one that gets 2 different conditions depending on where i log on at??? carl

 

[Fat Albert]

<font color="#ff0066">Thanks, Mike for your efforts....please, keep the nose to the grind....we love this site.....Fat Albert</font>

 

[beetlespin]

The problem is probably all of these pictures, footnotes, and avatars that everybody seems to be having more of. Also, I think you should just get rid of the front page.

Lance

 

[captXtreme]

I have had problems also one thing that has helped a lot is a small free program called XP scrub.</p>

there maybe programs for other O.S. on majorgeeks.com</p>

it neatly quickly cleans all cookies and caches temporary Internet files, as well as stored pages.</p>

if you use AOL it will bog you down also, i run defrag often as well. some times it just sucks waiting </p>

just my 2cents</p>

 

[Nickajack Angler]

The page cannot be displayed - Mike, first of all THANKS MUCH for your public and heartfelt reply. I was in the technology sector for 10 yrs and understand fully what you are saying. That being said, the first line of this reply is exactly what I just encountered 10 times when I hit reply and when I hit to PM you, this is the reply I received. I have a small suggestion to add..... CALL DAVID HAUN! He is an IT guy and has as much experience with this site and it's issues as anyone, also he has an interest in the site as a member probably more than he did as the site administrator. He has to be a valuable resource to you.
In my experience in testing websites and server issues, the ONLY true way to get to the root of an issue is to go to your end user. Get one of the hosting programmers out to one of our homes and see first hand. Billy would be who's house I would go to!!!!! Any of us regular members are happy to allow access to our boxes for a first hand look at the type of errors that we are getting. Doc1 too is a geek and would be a valuable resource. Just ask us, you probably have the key right here in the forum. A couple things that I notice. Your ad banners are running together. Right now, two banners are on the top of my screen.... Hal's TNProperty.net ad, and then it is connected to Rob's Dixie Jig Works is attached to the right and is only half showing on the top of the page and then scrolling down to the bottom, it wraps around onto the bottom, running into the next banner and shoving it off to the side. Another issue is that I have only recently cleaned up my mail box. That must be a HUGE eater of space and load times. I deleted my entire "Sent" folder that had messages WAY old and over a hundred in there. Maybe change the parameters for sizes of these mail features. And lastly, if you need to take the site down, DO IT! Just give ample warning. Send a PM to everyone and plan it out to do overnight just as any other server maintenance. I have scanned my hard drive, defragged, removed cookies, removed spyware and other parasitic items from my OS. Hope this helps. Feel free to call me or email to [email protected] I'll help this forum in anyway I can. I greatly appreciate your reply.

 

[popper 690]

Thats why I hav'nt posted much latley the site keeps timing out. emoMad

 

[Nickajack Angler]

I'm glad this topic has been recieved as it has. However I must share with all of you that I have spoken with a number of people and found that everyone who is having problems has COMCAST as an internet provider!!!!!! I'll bet you a bunch of money that this is a result of Comcast lying about thier committed information rates and not providing the level of service we have all been sold. SO, those of you that responded to this problem, call Comcast and vent on them. They owe you some money back for their failure to provide the level of service that they have committed to. It's called CIR - Committed Information Rate. This is the measurement that is used to show how much bandwidth (aka - speed) they are to provide. It's on them from what I can see now. Lots of people are not having these issues and are on another providers service. CALL! 800-COMCAST

 

[Cathooker]

One thing that helped me was to clear my cache of all the cookies. Since I did that I have'nt had any glitches show up.....now with me saying that the glitches will eat me alive........

 

[Buoy-Master]

Nickajack Angler - 5/30/2008 4:40 PM I'm glad this topic has been recieved as it has. However I must share with all of you that I have spoken with a number of people and found that everyone who is having problems has COMCAST as an internet provider!!!!!! I'll bet you a bunch of money that this is a result of Comcast lying about thier committed information rates and not providing the level of service we have all been sold. SO, those of you that responded to this problem, call Comcast and vent on them. They owe you some money back for their failure to provide the level of service that they have committed to. It's called CIR - Committed Information Rate. This is the measurement that is used to show how much bandwidth (aka - speed) they are to provide. It's on them from what I can see now. Lots of people are not having these issues and are on another providers service. CALL! 800-COMCAST

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Nice of you to share what I told you Nickajerk! Im kidding buddy!!!!

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However, it looks like a MAJOR part of the people having issues here are comcast users. I went through an entire list confirmed it. Spencer called the other day and I asked him to browes and look at what I was finding. Some you you have hotmail accounts and yahoo but I am willing to bet that your service is through Comcast. </p>

Thanks for doing some leg work for me Spenc!  </p>

 

[Guest]

I have Windstream and my caches are clear. I am also a member of 8 other forums. This one is the only one that is acting up.