To our fellow CPodders,
We want to sincerely apologize for all the service disruptions that happened over the past 24 hours. Yesterday, we had planned a 6 hours server upgrade to make the site smoother, faster and more reliable to all of our users. Unfortunately, we ran into unforeseen problems; thus, forcing us to unexpectedly close the website once again for another round of maintenance work and repairs.
We want to assure everyone that we remain committed to further improving our website / services and will be careful to avoid any other unforeseen disruptions in the future.
Kind regards,
Eileen
Hi Eileen,
thanks for the information. So the zh-content is coming back also? (already getting anxious…)
Thanks for the info Eileen, and sorry you guys had to go through so much hassle.
Can I make a suggestion? You could let people know when there is planned maintenance coming up. That’s what most places do. Even if you only know vague timeframes like “on Monday or Tuesday, and we’re hoping it will only take an hour or two” that’s fine, no need to make promises that fate might override. Or if it’s an emergency and you posted something just fifteen minutes beforehand, you’d still reach hundreds of us.
Also, you have email addresses for all subscribers. Couldn’t you send a short email to subscribers, preferably via in independent mail server, when the site actually goes down? That would help a lot, I’m sure.
Eileen, please tell me the forum can be fixed?
Eileen, thank you for the info. I agree AunySue. Please, let us know when a new maintenance is planned so we can be awared. I remember latest upgraded you did, sometime ago which also was a 头痛.
My apologies, also.
These are slightly unusual circumstances - there hasn’t yet been a full recovery from the earthquake, which is complicating things. For one thing I still only have intermittent access myself.
So, what’s wrong with the forum? I see that you guys are approaching 1,000 members. Brilliant. I also see that you’re being plagued by spammers. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Aunty, you are absoilutely right that it should have been announced. My bad. I take full responsibility for this. It won’t happen again.
Ken Carroll
Ken, all the Chinese characters have been corrupt and don’t display properly. New posts seem to work ok though.
I think we have spammers under control.
IN THE sTriKe zone: In baseball it’d be a strike，outside the box. In some workplaces resumes would be printed. Timelines, triage, practice runs, and client communication. There’s work to be done.
I dare you guys/gals to publish in the bright sun an upgrade timeline that captures every step and keyboard entry with expected and then actual time durations for the next major upgrade (minus any proprietary info). A scalding tan or glory awaits.
请你们多准备好，你们的要求不够。
2007/01/11 sorry
2006/07/27 sorry
2006/05/17 sorry
http://blogs.chinesepod.com/20.....ruption-2/
http://blogs.chinesepod.com/20.....july-27th/
http://blogs.chinesepod.com/20.....m-website/
I’d love to say that this hasn’t bothered me much. I have premium and love to use the review materials. I blogged recently on the ‘does this site work’ blog that it is extremely difficult to navigate through the different review materials of lessons.
Without any disruption, the navigation when it works is very slow and clumky, but when it doesn’t work, very frequently, I get kicked back to the home page.
I did not get a reply from that blog and it’s clear it’s because more academic, philosophical issues were more dominant in that blog.
But now that there are service disruptions, my frustrations are magnified. Service disruptions are infrequent but now rare.
With my renewal coming up, I’ve felt that premium materials is frustrating at best and have strongly considering going to basic or even ‘free’ as I don’t use transcripts much. Now these problems seal the deal.
Respectfully,
Ron Burr
I must say that I agree with Ron. I recently renewed my membership for one year but did so as a basic membership instead of premium. Perhaps I am wired too tight because my career field is quality assurance. Basically C-Pod is great and it has helped me very much in my goal to become fluent and literate in Mandarin. However, there are just too many “glitches” for me to justify the expense of a premium membership again until I feel that there is some careful planning and oversight in place to avoid having to hear so many excuses. All of the bells and whistles are nice…but only when they work relatively well and consistently. Also, it really hurts me to say what I said above but if you want the truth, that’s the truth
May I suggest that future upgrades be first deployed on a “pre-production” site and tests be run on this site to ensure there are no glitches before making it live? Chinesepod may even want to enlist several of its loyal subscribers to serve as the extra pair of eyes and check on each section to ensure that everything’s kosher.
To let you know that the spanish blog has already been atacked by spam.
Art Kho’s suggestion is the professional way of deploying updates.
An earlier announcement is not only important for readers, but also for the co-writers. So they can take some actions before.
I hope that you fix the forum trouble soon. A Chinese learning forum that can’t display Chinese anymore. Poor Bazza!
Poor Bazza and poor all of us!!
I think the blog had the same problem as the forum because one of the characters was missing from my name whilst it wasn’t working, but are back again now. So hopefully the forum can be corrected without losing anything.
Ron, In fact we are fully cognizant of the problems that you pointed out. Your points are valid and significant. We’ve been trying to deal with issues such as these in a systematic manner. The solution is coming. What I’ve learned with web tech, however, is that you cannot always do what you would like to do piecemeal, that is, bit by bit. If you try, the developers will go crazy - they need a plan that they can stick to. So, in response, we have planned out a new version of the site that encompasses exactly the types of things you mention. That will take a little while, but it’s on the way.
I respect your decision but I hope you realize that your comment were not being ignored - even if they did not get answered in that particular thread.
Bob, it is exactly the types of comment that you make here that will ensure that we do indeed put together the plans and oversight to ensure that this cannot happen again. All I can do is tell you that I am aware of the situation and promise to do my best to ensure it does not happen again.
Ken
Ken
I wonder how many issues especially using the Premium Subscription may not be completely Chinesepod problems but rather the network provider on the Poddie side.
I know at work most features work ok except at times the expanded dialogues don’t function well. However in my partment this feature always works well but PDF downloads are a bit slow compared to work. (instantaneous vs 5-10secs)
Since we Poddies are all over the world. The speed and quality of our connections I am sure varies greatly. I wonder if some smart guy could make up a test. That we all could use to check out either our speed or robustness that your designers could use to minimize differences poddies see.
Mike in Jubei
any idea when zh.chinesepod.com will be back again, it’s been 2 days now, still not working?! can’t be a connection problem on my side, I have fast links both at work and at home. I do experience different issues as Mike in Jubei indicated but I think it’s because of our firewall and stuff at work
Yv
Yv,
ZH had a special problem all its own having to do with DNS. It’s really weird; it actually only affects users in China. (Please tell me you’re in China!) The tech team is hard at work on a workaround, and ZH should be accessible again soon.
Again, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Believe us when we say that the momentary discomforts are all going to be worthwhile when we start rolling out the new features…
-John
Mike,
Thx for the suggestion. I think you’re right.
Having said that, its still our job to make the service as smooth as possible. We’ll try.
Ken Carroll
John,
I am sitting in a German office right now. Far, far away from China. I am also not able to access the ZH-site since 2 days. But I am patient.
But if it is only a DNS-problem: Could you just post the IP-Number? I could just enter it into my hosts-file and thereby bypass the DNS.
I’m in Malta. Also not able to access ZH-site since the ‘upgrade’.
For me, all the premium features work all the time (Los Angeles, USA night time). The amount of benefit that I get from Cpod and the fact that the site has no advertisement more than offset the infrequent outages.
UPDATES - I guess things are still being sorted out? I by chance found out that a direct URL gave access to the blog, but a simple blogs.chinesepod.com gives the outage notice.
Is it that DNS servers haven’t synched up or is your server still serving up that page. When we did implementations we had service-level agreements on how often to give updates, for example every half-hour or every two hours, etc.
Seems at least half a day has gone by, shouldn’t be too hard to update the outage notification page with some sort of eta.
I can access zh.chinesepod.com just fine, both from Sitzerland and Slovakia (IP is 205.209.141.110).
Acessing zh. in oz now too.
And just to warm your cockles, I have zh access from the Big Apple (not that I need it, just thought I’d let you know).
I have been of the line for 6 hour. And seem to be outdated among DNS and URL-er. It seems to rock around you fellows. Here is my old reply….
Mike I don’t need a test. I know it does not work.
The reason is of course (or of curse) I am in China at the moment and have not been able to download anything for the last 14 days. Hardly get to the blog.
But it has got me thinking. I have 2 Mbit line in China and experienced some problem at times before the quake. I also had the same problem in Stockholm at times, had problem to download on my 24Mbit service (In the middle of Ericsson Nokia country) I then was thinking, the problem was with my provider. But I can access other demanding sites in Europe, here from China.
So then, the problem is…. Chinese pod is getting to big. All traffic going by USA, it is no good. The podies, who are out on the fringes, get the second go, from the server.
I suggest. Look into this. Set up servers in Europe and Asia.
I had a building business in Australia during the 1980 There was two equal suppliers of sanitary goods. One had a superb phone line. The other one, you hardly got true. You guess who got my order.
You are growing out of your pants Ken
Have a nice day. You people who still are able to enjoy the daily podcast.
I will eventually renew my premium. If I can get true and use my card on the line
thx John and Eileen for the support. Unfortunately, I’m not in China even though that’s where I want to be
I’m commuting between France and Switzerland and unable to access zh.chinesepod.com through either a French provider or my company network with gateway in Switzerland. the alternate link to http://advanced.chinesepod.com/ does work though, so it does indeed look like some weird DNS issue.
BTW, it’s the 1st ChinesePod outage I experienced, have had nothing to complain about so far other than performance problem post earthquake, and while it does show how dependent I have become on it, it’s far more serious than anybody will tolerate nowadays (even with proper planning). That wouldn’t be enough of a reason for me to cancel my premium subscription but I have to say that an internet business needs a google or amazon-grade technical platform
Yv
and btw, it’s not entirely surprising that some people in the same countries would be in a different situation re: zh.chinesepod.com, dns records may take up to 48 hours to propagate across the net. Could be as fast as an hour but varies tremendously depending on caching options along the way, due different providers / gateways etc.
Yv
Might I humbly suggest that if there were a way of downloading the premium content and working offline with it, then the pain of the inevitable outages or other impeding performance issues would be mitigated.
FYI, zh.chinesepod.com hasn’t been accessible from NYC for the past 9 hours.
Delta,
There is a roundabout way to work with the premium content offline, but it takes some effort and could certainly be made easier by ChinesePod.
If you’re using Firefox, install the Scrapbook plug-in and capture the expansion pages, make sure you enable Images and swf file extensions under Custom. That creates a local copy of all page components which you can work with offline. Database-driven functionality will be missing though, so clicking on vocab won’t store it into your WordBank though mouseovers should work.
One quick way ChinesePod could make this process easier is to reflect the lesson topic/category into page title rather than calling everything “Learn Chinese” but beyond that I found it’s very easy to do once you get into the pattern.
Yv
Next humble suggestion: Make Yv’s workaround a sticky. Hey, where are the essential sticky’s anyway?
Hi Ken-
I appreciate your response. I will renew on premium because knowing that you’re working on the ‘guts’ of the system is enough for me
I’ve always loved the content side.
Off-line, I’ll contribute some concerns and suggestions that to throw in that ‘guts’ bucket.
Ron
ron,
Keep the suggestions coming. I want to know what you think.
Ken Carroll
Ken, one additional suggestion that would help capturing premium stuff for offline use (which has other applications besides outage) is to make available again the link that allowed dialogue+expansion to be loaded on the same page.
As an example, http://www.chinesepod.com/m_dialogue.php?p=356 and http://www.chinesepod.com/m_expansion.php?p=356 could be accessed simultaneously through http://www.chinesepod.com/tran.....php?p=356. Try with a recent lesson, e.g. 513 (Going to the Gym), it no longer works. Exercices could easily be added to the bottom for easy download, avoiding the need for multiple page capture on each lesson/
Yv
Want to tell you.
China. Shenzhen is back on the line.
Have downloaded 3 podcast so far
Nada - Can’t these advanced podcasts be put on an internal-China link? I can’t download these large mp3 files…
无线 －请你们放下那些博客mp3在国内的网站。因为我也是在中国，现在没办法下线！
lucky Shenzhen….
Not lucky, exept that I’m in Shenzhen.
Got 3 podcast that’s all: Exept for our new China link, now it is only 3 missing 1st to 3rd January, with no China link.
Thanks Ken.
But my old worry remain -it is damaging for CPOD not to reach out
January 18, 2007. January 18, 2007. I think I will call my telecom company helpline every day and chat with them. I barely can get to email today. I can blog post though…hence I’m posting LOTs!
Do I hear an echo in here?
Thanks for sharing
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links: