The Front Row

Thats why most companies do these type of things overnight, to upset as little people as possible. Im not upset here at all, im just saying if your going to mess around with the site it shouldnt be during peak business hours. That just doesn't make sense.

Some maintenance downtime cannot be avoided. DBs need maintenance, hardware fails and both servers and software hang on occasion. You absolutely could build massive redundancy, hot-swap capability and backup into the system to reduce this near zero...but some small amount of downtime would remain.

Buying packaged software (read widely used = already extensively developed and tested) would solve a very large portion of the "lack of features" and "bugs" problems. Doing this also means not having a system customized to some extent.

Sandbox servers and extensive pre-launch beta-testing of "home-grown code" could certainly eliminate a huge proportion (read 99+ percent) of "post-push" problems. This would mean having a bunch of people using a buggy beta site to find the bugs and simulate the traffic volumes.

In addition to the opportunity cost (people dealing with buggy beat systems, having the same features as many other sites, etc.), all these things have a not insignificant dollar cost. And each incremental improvement in uptime comes at an exponentially increasing cost. (If X uptime costs $1000/mo, 2X uptime may cost $10,000-$20,000/mo.)

247 chose to offer their service at a price point they felt the market would bear. The resulting budget projections gave them X dollars for hardware, Y dollars for software and Z dollars for sandboxes / pre-launch testing (while still paying their employees/partners and making a profit). Given those finite budgets and how they chose to spend that money, we users get only certain features and must accept some bugs and downtime.

The business model is pretty simple. 247 is betting the bundle of content (i.e. Bucknuts staff for us) plus the features and uptime they offer will be good enough to get, satisfy and keep users. If/when someone offers a more compelling package of content, features and uptime...247 will lose customers. If we (or you) are not satisfied with the content, features and/or uptime...you can always vote with your feet.

Until then, bitch when you need to blow off steam...but we're still going to get what we're going to get in terms of features and uptime. Bitching makes almost no difference because 247 has already set their budgets and decided how to put that money to use. They can show empathy, but the plan is in motion and there is damn little they can do to improve features or uptime without drastically increasing prices and/or taking paycuts (and dividend cuts).

What's even funnier is that I was downvoted two times on another thread for repeat posts, when I think it was the site that was messing up and not my pc. Some people need to get a life instead of trolling through threads looking to downvote anyone they can. That's just funny to me. Go BUCKS!!!

Yeah I had problems literally 2 minutes after I read this thread...in fact I was going to reply and got the dreaded "Whoops" message. Whoever said it goes down once a month was way off from what I've seen. Several times in the last few days is more like it.