greg's dashboard

greg replied on November 26, 2008 21:52 to the question "How do I turn off forced edits during picture upload?" in TeeBeeDee:

The reason for the standardization is to keep the formatting of the pages consistent. If you were to upload a panoramic photo to your profile, for example, and wanted to keep those dimensions, everything in the layout of the page(s) would be out of whack and the site would look "broken".

The columns and typesetting would not line up right, and it makes the site unreadable. (We fix bugs like this in testing before things go live.)

If you have access to some basic image editing tool, my suggestion is that you might want to center the image on a standard-sized, larger-sized blank canvas. It will create empty spaces in the image to fill out the shape, but it should avoid the problem you seem to state here.

greg replied on October 23, 2008 18:55 to the question "Join page is not accepting the mystery word" in TeeBeeDee:

Just tried to register a new test account we could delete, and it went through just fine.

Can you try reloading the page to get a different word?

greg replied on October 10, 2008 16:47 to the problem "are you having problems? I cannot get the page or sign in?" in TeeBeeDee:

What browser are you using?

In any case, it sounds like we may have had an image-related glitch later yesterday evening (no hard evidence yet, just another user report besides yours). Don't know if it's cleared up now, but it would help to know...

Thanks

greg replied on October 10, 2008 16:45 to the problem "Won't take my passwords on registration and keeps locking while trying to report problem." in TeeBeeDee:

It's been through QA several times, we can assure you. Per Robin above, we have occasionally heard of issues from people using Chrome (which, given its current adoption, we don't as thoroughly test). Another possibility is that you could have encountered a database exception for some reason.

Three of us tried to register for accounts in different browsers since you posted this, and none of us could recreate the issues your experiencing. So any additional info you can provide will be of great help.

greg replied on September 28, 2008 19:35 to the question "Time Zone Change" in TeeBeeDee:

Sorry for a lack of response here. We hope you haven't noticed, but chances are that you have -- but we've had our hands full with shoring up the service in terms of stability and uptime in response to the continuing rise in usage and traffic. Our #1 focus is on ensuring a more stable and more responsive user experience on the site.

This has been our core focus and priority for the past three weeks, so anything that has not fit that bill has followed in priority -- including user suggestions, members with specific questions, etc. We hope you understand.

And where you see "TeeBeeDee is here! 9 employees are listening and participating.", that only reflects the number of employees with accounts here. It does not mean we are all actively spending time on this GetSatisfaction site waiting for questions -- when, arguably, we all should be getting the core service working better for our users. So sorry if that left you with the wrong impression.

The timestamps that are associated with posts originate from our servers, and the data is stored in Pacific Time. To make that adjustable per a member's location anywhere in the world, we'd need to prioritize some development work to have the Web pages interact with the local timezones programmed on each of your computers, mobile phones, etc.

It's a good suggestion. But admittedly, it's not likely something we're going to prioritize over other needs in the near future.

greg replied on September 19, 2008 16:26 to the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

Thanks, all. We have enough data to narrow down where we think the problem might be. It's not looking like the load balancer networking hardware, but rather some connection configurations between our Web servers and application servers (plus some rogue bit of open source software that looks like it could misbehave under certain conditions).

We're operating from the premise that most people experience this as a sustained, but relatively brief, period where they are logged out every minute or two -- followed by longer periods without a problem. If there's something different to your experience, please let us know.

Also, do note that some 2 hours of inactivity will log you out also (unless you check the "Keep me signed in on this computer." checkbox on login) -- as the server memory allocated to your login session gets cycled out for newer users (and keeps the memory allocated towards better performance for active users on the site). If you have an online banking account, it's not entirely unlike that -- except that they will typically log you out after 15 minutes of inactivity for reasons of financial data security.

greg replied on September 18, 2008 18:56 to the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

Great! You nailed it: you're currently connected to server 21. Let us know if you get kicked out again. If so, we should check it right away and see if that server number changed.

greg replied on September 18, 2008 18:35 to the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

Btw, another, more involved bit of data investigation that could help is this: getting a value in one of your TBD cookies before and after you experience being "logged out" unintentionally.

Cookies are harder to read the values of in IE these days, but for Firefox you go through the following menu sequence:

Tools -> Applications (unless you're on a Mac, where it's Firefox -> Preferences)
-> Privacy tab
-> Show Cookies button
type "tbd"
find the cookie named "JSESSIONID"
it will have a value of xxxxxxx.worker_##

Those two digits indicated by '##' are what's important. This is what our data center provider's load balancer hardware is adding, and they identify a specific server number that you are connecting to. If the server number in the cookie is changing when you experience being logged out, it indicates that their networking hardware (their load balancer) is contributing to the problem.

It's one of the primary suspects right now, but they seem to think things have checked out fine since their audit of things. So right now we're focused more on possibilities in our server configurations...but we aren't fully confident their audit caught everything.

A comment on the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

For the security of your own personal information (and hence to not post any details here on a public Web board), I would message Kat: feedback @ tbd dot com.

Coincidentally, she's experienced some of the same problems herself at times.

In the meantime, we're dedicating another engineer to look into this today from our end and verify if it is or is not something our software is contributing. – greg, on September 18, 2008 16:44

greg replied on September 18, 2008 03:50 to the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

Believe me -- we had people who were in the office until 4:30am last night working on this kind of stuff. So sorry if we somehow left the impression that we were sitting on our hands about it.

As for the "what", here's a few questions that could be of help to narrow things down...
* Do you always visit the site from the same location/browser?
* Does the logout happen constantly as you've used the site over the past few days, or only at some times and not so much at other times?
- Also: Does it happen at some locations and not others (per the last question)?
* What browser(s) are you using? What version number(s)?
* What operating system is/are your computer(s)?
* How do you connect to the Internet? (work connection, home dial-up, cable modem, DSL, etc.)
* Are you using some kind of firewall software? (Zone Alarm, etc.)

There will probably be more questions after this initial wave, and they would best go to Kat rather than fill up the pages here.

I apologize for all the questions. But as you can tell from the posts on the site, for every person who reports being logged out, there are others who have simultaneously said they haven't experienced that problem. Which makes determining why it might be affecting some users but not others very tricky, and it leads us to ask questions about how some users are different from others in how they access the site.

greg replied on September 17, 2008 23:59 to the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

We've finally made some great strides on the availability piece after our scheduled downtime last night. We had to rip out networking hardware that our data center provider recommended for uptime but contributed to giving us anything but. We also changed our database connection pooling framework after running a new solution through some serious testing. Those are contributing from what we see. We're far from being out of the woods, but things today are more stable than we've seen in weeks.

As for the logging out issue, we've been aware of reports since Friday. Since Saturday we've been unable to replicate it, so we've been looking for needles in haystacks by verifying dozens of systems and configurations that might contribute to that. Not being able to reproduce it makes it very difficult to isolate what might be going on, so hopefully you're in touch with Kat about the specifics as we need to take the guesswork out to make faster progress (which I am sure is no where near fast enough).

Sorry for your troubles. We believe you when you say they're happening. We just have to get to a point where we're not chasing "ghosts" and can have something in hand we can identify and work with.

greg replied on September 13, 2008 23:56 to the problem "Why am I getting logged out?" in TeeBeeDee:

We've narrowed it down to the load balancers at our data center provider. We've filed tickets for them to investigate.

greg replied on September 10, 2008 03:42 to the problem "Personal Firewall hides my secondary hard drive" in Sunbelt Software:

Well, gave it a try. Inbound Internet and Trusted network connections were set to default "allow", and after reboots my secondary hard drive still failed to appear. Uninstalled Personal Firewall once again, and magically they appear again.

Any other suggestions?

greg replied on September 09, 2008 18:11 to the problem "Personal Firewall hides my secondary hard drive" in Sunbelt Software:

Thanks for the speedy reply, Justin. I will try this when I get home tonight and will let you know.

greg reported a problem in Sunbelt Software on September 09, 2008 06:13:

Personal Firewall hides my secondary hard drive

Personal Firewall obscures the existence of my secondary hard drive. It's an IDE drive that's hooked up with an adapter on my serial ATA port on a Dell Dimension E310 running Windows XP SP3. If I reboot my computer after installing Sunbelt Personal Firewall, my spare drive disappears.

And when I say "disappears", I really mean mean it: every sign of its existence vanishes on the system, and it won't even show up in the Windows Device Manager. Yet if I remove Sunbelt Personal Firewall, or if I boot up in Safe Mode, the drive reappears just fine.

Is there a special configuration option I should use to relax a rule set or to add an exclusion for possible traffic to a local drive like that? I would expect a firewall solution to worry about external access to resources, but not internal resources.

greg replied on September 03, 2008 16:29 to the idea "Increase number of discussions viewed on a page." in TeeBeeDee:

We love product suggestions at TBD, so thank you for suggesting this. We'll certainly discuss it -- and compare with the list of fixes/enhancements/features from which we're currently working.

greg replied on August 20, 2008 20:37 to the problem "Discussion alerts" in TeeBeeDee:

Thanks. We are working on a fix for content alerts on group discussions that will not cause members to receive content alerts for other discussions in the group that do not concern them. This is planned for a release later this week, so stay tuned...

greg replied on August 04, 2008 16:22 to the problem "server error" in TeeBeeDee:

We sure can't get anything past you guys. ;) You're right. The same search indexing contention error appeared and we cleared it up Saturday morning. We're currently in the process of replacing our searching framework to eliminate the odds of this happening entirely.

greg replied on July 16, 2008 21:33 to the problem "Internal Server Error mssg. preventing me from editing my profile" in TeeBeeDee:

Please give it another try. We were able to trace what we believed to be the source of the problem down to a nasty issue where there was a system resource that was being locked up for updating entries in the search index. The block was removed a little over an hour ago and things seem to be continuing as normal on all servers now.

We are still undergoing some system tuning to improve response times of the database and site for the medium-term and longer-term. But we should at least be past the near-term acute stage.

Sorry for the problem.

greg replied on July 16, 2008 21:30 to the question "Registration broken?" in TeeBeeDee:

Please give it another try. We rooted the problem down to a nasty issue where there was a system resource that was being locked up for updating entries in the search index. It was removed a little over an hour ago and registration seems to be continuing fine on all servers now.

Sorry for the headaches, and thanks for your continued persistence!