Comments for NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Blog

Comment on A PHP Include Exploit Explained by James

James — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:29:44 +0000

There’s at least two reasons in my mind *for some people* not to use an existing CMS. The first is that a lot of the existing ones are fairly monolithic and therefore on NFSN will take up more disk space and so forth, increasing costs. The second is that some of us write our own because that’s what we want to do – whether as a learning experience or just because we can.

As demonstrated in this blog post, though, if any of us intend to roll our own we really need to pay attention to things like this!

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Mike

Mike — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:32:52 +0000

Just a quick comment to say that this is exactly what I expect from NFSN (in a good way). I’m glad you don’t email me, I’d rather take the RSS feed. It’s a shame there’s got to be downtime, but no amount of notice would have made it better so no problems there either.

Once again, I admire the comparative honesty and frankness that we get from NFSN.

We should remember that we’re not paying for some kind of 99.999% uptime SLA. Just like we’re not paying for poor jdw to stay up all night moving servers around. At least we’re not paying during these outages (like pay monthly customers would).

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Ben

Ben — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:54:01 +0000

As many have noted above, email or some form of “reach out and touch” us communication for this sort of announcement…. twitter seems perfect for this sort of thing? and you don’t have to worry about mass-mail blacklists…. anyways, just my 2 cents.

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by jdw

jdw — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:23:20 +0000

Copying over a message posted in a related discussion in our forum. Anyone who has suggestions, please bring them in over there. As I’ve opined before, I don’t feel blog comments are a good place for a threaded discussion.

-jdw

If someone wants to suggest a reasonable mechanism for doing this, we’d certainly consider it.

Every time we’ve been down that road, we wound up regretting it.

“Just send the messages” isn’t an answer. It results in us spending days getting off of spam blacklists.

We also aren’t quite large enough, nor do we send enough correspondence to justify using one of the big legitimate bulk email firms. They’re really expensive because they want you to be sending out regular newsletters, something we’d never do.

It’s a situation where the solution sounds easy, but actually isn’t.

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Daran

Daran — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 07:00:18 +0000

I recommend using an RSS feed aggregator or an RSS-to-email gateway on our “News & Announcements” feed.

Could you please create and use a new category: “Maintenance Pending”, and removed the category from any blog post once the maintenance is complete.

I could then add an RSS sidebar widget to my blog attached to that feed. Currently I can attach to the “Network Status” feed, but then stale announcements hang around forever.

It’s very low-noise and will keep you abreast of important issues without getting us spam blacklisted for sending out mass emails. -jdw

Every other business I deal with on the internet sends me mass emails no problem. (It’s not spam if you have a prior business arrangement.) I don’t understand why you’re different. (And it’s not like you’ve never sent mass emails before.)

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Chris

Chris — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:12:02 +0000

I concur with the previous comments regarding an emailed announcement. An RSS subscription (requiring me to be proactive) is no substitute for good customer communication.

I would add further, that every other vendor that i use schedules maintenance like this for an overnight window, and I would have (and still do) expect the same from NFS.

The nature of a global Internet is that somebody’s overnight is somebody else’s midday. We picked the right time based on all the factors at play, including historic network activity which is far more important than time of day. I’m sorry if it didn’t suit your particular situation. -jdw

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Graham

Graham — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:07:05 +0000

Is there any chance we could set up our own “we’re down for maintenance” pages in future? I’d prefer to brand ours with our own content rather than with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET’s content — this confused some of our readers.

It would be nice if that were possible, but in a case such as this, anything like that would also have been affected. We were pretty much stuck with a one-size-fits-all message. Sorry for any confusion that resulted! -jdw

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Bob

Bob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:04:12 +0000

Would have been nice to have more notice. 2 days just isn’t acceptable, regardless of your barely specified excuses.

No matter how notice there is; more would always be better. “As much as possible” is the best we can do. -jdw

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Rob

Rob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:00:07 +0000

I was caught totally unprepared by this.

Announcing only on your blog that services will be down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day is not the greatest form of communication; I would have appreciated a short mass-email.

Believe it or not, I don’t usually have the time to visit the blogs of all my various service providers and product vendors every day to keep track of their announcements.

I recommend using an RSS feed aggregator or an RSS-to-email gateway on our “News & Announcements” feed. It’s very low-noise and will keep you abreast of important issues without getting us spam blacklisted for sending out mass emails. -jdw

Comment on Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20 by Eddy

Eddy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:48:50 +0000

Thanks for letting us know. I really appreciate it.