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FEATURE REQUEST: Using Twitter/Forum as website offline/online/issues updates


HeroBiX

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Currently your guys website has been having issues since about 9am (3h now) and I have been watching Instagram and Twitter for any updates, as well as this forum. 

 

Would be AMAZING to be able to have a place or 2 where you can read about issues, what is happening, what you guys are working on, how we can help etc. 

 

Some websites/tools have usually a status page where they list their different sections of their app and what the current status is. That would be amazing for Geocaching as well. 

 

AT LEAST update us in the forums and on Twitter to let people know AT LEAST that you guys are working on the issue. Sitting in the dark is the worst and I feel paying for premium to help you guys keep going, feels less pleasing when I can't even enjoy the game without any reason why it isn't working. 

 

Especially doing updates on Twitter and the geocaching forum is asking for a few minutes of your guys time. 

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Please see Geocaching.com's Status Page via Pingdom.  In addition, outages and slow response time issues are frequently acknowledged both here in the Forums and on Geocaching HQ's social media outlets.  Here is the most recent example.  In response to this report, and others received through other channels, engineering pulled a faulty server.

 

Between reviewer duties and as a player planning an upcoming roadtrip, I've been busy on the site nearly hourly for the past eight hours.  I haven't seen any performance issues, which is consistent with what the status page says.

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6 minutes ago, Keystone said:

Please see Geocaching.com's Status Page via Pingdom.

...

Between reviewer duties and as a player planning an upcoming roadtrip, I've been busy on the site nearly hourly for the past eight hours.  I haven't seen any performance issues, which is consistent with what the status page says.

That status page really doesn't tell us much, though. All it tells us is that those various sites are responding to pings and are visible on the internet. It doesn't tell us anything about how they may be performing or whether they're correctly doing what they're supposed to do. In the cases like the example you linked to or when members get 500 errors, the Pingdom page would happily tell you that the site is just fine. It would need to be a true outage where the site isn't accessible at all before Pingdom would tell you anything is wrong.

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@keystone, thank you! 
The status page isn't really descriptive of what is going on and the link you posted to the forum, it doesn't include the issues we had earlier today for a couple of hours. Also missing the resolution and what caused the issue. 

 

I don't know what team size you guys have for website and service support. Just having feedback coming through Twitter/Instagram is a really fast way to let people know what is going on and there is not a lot of people who knows about `http://status.geocaching.com/` and it is not telling the user if the issue is happening on iPhone or Android or on Desktop, since the issue t his morning only really happen on Desktop.  

 

I appreciate what information you guys have and from what you read it sounds like you guys are understaff, my request still stand in the sense that it would be amazing if we could get status report through Twitter and Forums with status updates of how things are going/progress or at least, when it is back up and what was done to make sure this issue is not occurring again. 

 

I am not trying to blame anyone or being rude, this is a purely a suggestion to make things more see through for us, the users. 

I am sure more people would love to see more feedback/updates when something is down or being updated. 

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As a long-time iser of rhe site, I prefer that the folks keeping things humming and patching the breaks, dont take the time to tell everyone what they are doing, and that the iOS app had an issue this morning that was rectified by resetting a server.

I don't see that it is anyone's business what issues we're fixed, other than the folks doing the repairs and their managers. It certainly is no business of the consumers.

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2 hours ago, K13 said:

I don't see that it is anyone's business what issues we're fixed, other than the folks doing the repairs and their managers. It certainly is no business of the consumers.

 

You are right but some companies have decided to do otherwise. I am not using Twritter/Instagram/Facebook etc. If the company have something to report they could send me an email. I get tons of email from Groudspeak and one additional message about ongoing issues would be welcome.

Edited by arisoft
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16 hours ago, HeroBiX said:

Currently your guys website has been having issues since about 9am (3h now) and I have been watching Instagram and Twitter for any updates, as well as this forum. 

Would be AMAZING to be able to have a place or 2 where you can read about issues, what is happening, what you guys are working on, how we can help etc. 

Some websites/tools have usually a status page where they list their different sections of their app and what the current status is. That would be amazing for Geocaching as well. 

AT LEAST update us in the forums and on Twitter to let people know AT LEAST that you guys are working on the issue. Sitting in the dark is the worst and I feel paying for premium to help you guys keep going, feels less pleasing when I can't even enjoy the game without any reason why it isn't working. 

Especially doing updates on Twitter and the geocaching forum is asking for a few minutes of your guys time. 

  

I have a relative that will call fifty times during a power outage, knowing whatever "answer"  there is on that machine will probably be the same.

They went from a live person to that "rough estimate" message system because it's a real pain-in-the-can to respond to some people. 

I'd guess a few hundred folks have told me they pay my salary over the years...    

 

There have been times when advanced notice of downtime was placed prominently along the tops of pages here and geocaching.com.

I don't think the folks working at Groundspeak should have to "report" to anyone but their employer.

Notifying people with "updates" every time a server has a worn hamster just eats time they could have used to fix the problem.  

Unless it's a weekend morning, we just assume someone's fixing whatever "problem" there is when we notice it.   :)

Sometimes folks find it's only their problem when others say,  "That's odd, I don't have that.  Must be you".

Don't know why they spend so much time afterwards to tell everyone they're wrong,  but rarely return later to say they were right... 

 

Most would know about an issue affecting others by all the multi-thread, panic posts scattered throughout many sub-forums. 

Try to keep up with them all.     :D

 

 

 

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On ‎8‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 12:11 PM, HeroBiX said:

AT LEAST update us in the forums and on Twitter to let people know AT LEAST that you guys are working on the issue.

 

TPTB have usually done both of these in the past. If someone posts here in the forums reporting a major issue with the site or a component of the site, someone from HQ often posts to acknowledge the issue and report when it's fixed. For larger outages, I've seen them tweet.

 

On ‎8‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 1:42 PM, HeroBiX said:

The status page isn't really descriptive of what is going on and the link you posted to the forum, it doesn't include the issues we had earlier today for a couple of hours. Also missing the resolution and what caused the issue.

 

They can only respond to and fix what they know about. There weren't any reports of issues at that time here in the forum, and others have reported that the site was generally working fine. If you run into an issue in the future and nobody has started a discussion about it yet, feel free to start one here which will get the attention of HQ and allow other members to report whether they're seeing the same thing.

 

Quote

I am not trying to blame anyone or being rude, this is a purely a suggestion to make things more see through for us, the users.

 

For some things, HQ can be fairly transparent. However, for most things, they've decided that we don't need to know the details or background. I often disagree with that approach, but we have to live with that decision. That being said, when there is a major issue with one of the services, they're usually pretty good about letting us know what's going on.

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