Recent Site Outage - the good, the bad and the ugly

[Mr. K]

Hello again folks, your friendly (and haggard) OTT admin here,

The site was down starting early Saturday morning (PST) and remained that way until just recently - Monday morning. The little host we were on when we first started 4-1/2 years ago finally gave up the ghost and we took that opportunity to migrate instead of putting another patch on. Not a bad problem to have just means a lot of frantic work in a short period of time.

The Good
We are with a new hosting provider. It is fast, it is spacious and it will be enough to support our growth for a few more years yet. This means that the site should be more stable going forward and suffer less downtime, something that has been an ongoing issue for about a year now.

The Bad
The gallery and specification sections of the site did not survive the transition to the new hosting provider. They were both early additions to the site that lacked polish and I've been meaning to improve them for some time now. It was best to retire them at this time.

You will see that they are no longer available on the top navigation bar. I am in the process of either developing or finding better alternatives for those two sections. Stay tuned in this regard.

The Ugly
The last 2 weeks of threads, posts, IMs and any other activity on the forums is lost. The database stage 5 detonated about a day before the next backup was to run. This meant we have rolled back to a March 15th state.

Looking Forward
Renovations are underway once again at OrangeTractorTalks! We have a new hosting platform and plans to rollout an updated look in the near future. There are also a few other ideas and treats that myself and Vic have planned. It's an exciting time!

Thank you for hanging in there and as always, myself and Vic appreciate you taking the time out of your day to stop by and check out our humble orange tractor site.

 

[seanbarr]

Ouch! I was going through withdrawals but I'm good now.

 

[Eric McCarthy]

I was thinking to help weed out and thin down some of the problems is to remove some members who haven't logged on in the last 6 months or so. There are alot of members who come on here with a problem on their tractor get the answers they need and high tail it out of here once the problem is fixed.

Maybe send out a notice to any account who hasn't been active for 6 months or so and remove the one's that aren't active.

 

[bky]

I would agree it would be a good idea to weed out the unused members but wouldn't it hurt the advertising. Mr K couldn't say we have x number of members on this site. the actual numbers would be lower than what it is now. isn't it a numbers game?

 

[benben]

nice you are back again,a bit more and I start crying
Benben

 

[Rob]

Nice to be online again, its a bit boring without OTT now.

Anyway, lets all hope it runs as smoothly as before , but seriously guys, its a tuff job , but someone had to do it, nice work to you guys behind OTT.

rob

 

[Kubota_Man]

Thank You!!! Thank You!!! Thank You!!! for all you do guys

My wife kept asking if I was alright. I told her yeah just going through withdrawls.

Is there a chance there could be an OTT@whatever.com email address that could be published so when us addicts are having withdrawl issues we could email you guys? Thus knowing if it is our issue or the server is down.

 

[Mr. K]

Thanks for the support gents, appreciate it.

Eric and bky - not a bad idea but those folks that come and go are not the main contributors to why the site gets bigger and needs upgrading - you are! Allow me to explain...

Aside from lots of people on it, another way the site strains is just the sheer amount of content that has been generated. Every thread that is started or reply that is posted - all that text goes into the database. Over time, it just grows and grows. 4-1/2 years worth so far.

Right now we are at just under 10K threads and 61K posts. That's a lot, but... still tiny compared to the "big boards" (TBN). For fun, let's compare ourselves size-wise to TBN. OTT has about 80 users online vs TBN 8582, nearly 100x more. OTT has 10K threads, TBN 267K. OTT has 61K posts and TBN has a bone crushing 3.2M posts. Simply massive.

The moral of this story? 1) there is always a bigger fish and 2) his hardware is nicer than yours!

 

[E/S]

That is why they call it fishing, not catching.
Good to have you back.


E/S

 

[bky]

Mr. K i have been a member to tbn for a long time. and yes there is a wealth of information there. but at times there are too many post to keep up with. i was with that site when they were a lot smaller and the information was easier to find. but i seem to be spending more time on this site.(easier to see all the post(that's a good thing). I do really appreciate all you do to keep this site up and in time i am sure it will get as big as tbn.

 

[lsmurphy]

Thank you.

 

[Eric McCarthy]

You know I almost started up a support group for those lost and strayed members of OTT on a Facebook page so the regulars could keep tabs on one another and get a small dosing of OTT while the site was down. I know for myself I have became friends with Hodge, Kubota Man and Bulldog on there.

But without me having any doings or affiliation with the behind the scenes stuff of OTT {i.e. I'm not the owner of this sight} I didn't want to step on anybody's toes.

But I was real close on the funny side of things starting an OTT Fan Support page on Facebook!

 

[Stumpy]

Good to hear about the migration. I honestly hadn't noticed any problems (compliments to you) except for the occasional weekend of down time. Room for expansion and new hardware is always a good thing.

 

[benben]

on OTT we have those real helpers,like SD Vic,Stumpy,Ismurphy and all those other special Kubota special neckbrakers not to compare with those talkers from TBN without the real knowhow about the orange one.

a tractor is a tractor and a Kubota is a Kubota without any questions

Benben
thanks again to the OTT and tose special peoples care about the orangeone

 

[Mr. K]

Just tried TractorByNet (tractorbynet.com) and they are down now too! I take back what I said about the big guys having nicer hardware!

 

[lsmurphy]

Just tried TractorByNet (tractorbynet.com) and they are down now too! I take back what I said about the big guys having nicer hardware!

Do you think it's possible to begin a new sub forum for us to post part numbers and suppliers?

Possibly a section with sub categories by series? Such as L and M and B etc....


Reason I'm asking.....for example.....

Poster just replaced his dynamo bearings, I'd like to be able to come back to that thread later as I need to and bring up his info.

Just for a comprehensive source of info.

 

[Lil Foot]

I have been thinking along the same lines for the grey market stuff..... a crossover list of grey model numbers to US versions, a list of what US part numbers work as replacements for the greys, etc.
It seems it would cut down on a lot of re-asked questions.

Hey, 500 posts!

 

[DonDC]

Glad to see you are up and running again. Onwards and upwards.

 

[Eric McCarthy]

Do you think it's possible to begin a new sub forum for us to post part numbers and suppliers?

Possibly a section with sub categories by series? Such as L and M and B etc....


Reason I'm asking.....for example.....

Poster just replaced his dynamo bearings, I'd like to be able to come back to that thread later as I need to and bring up his info.

Just for a comprehensive source of info.

You can subscribe to any thread on here and when new post's pop up you'll get a notice about it in your inbox. If you click on the start of the thread you'll see up to there's an are that says "thread tools" click on that and subscribe to the threads you want to keep up with.

 

[lsmurphy]

You can subscribe to any thread on here and when new post's pop up you'll get a notice about it in your inbox. If you click on the start of the thread you'll see up to there's an are that says "thread tools" click on that and subscribe to the threads you want to keep up with.

Seriously?

I belong to a number of forums. Sometimes posting 30 times a day, very active on other forums. I cannot keep track of every thread, I cannot bog down my email with subcribed threads.

When it comes to wheel/tire combinations for the 7100, I have looked at every site that carries anything that would fit, looked at every front to rear combination available, priced all and so forth. That info should be posted and I would have if there were a specific place to post it. In fact I spent two months locating the combination that I chose, it's a lot of work, most of which is lost now.

So will be the info on the bearings.......buried deep in the abys lost threads.