The State of WinCustomize Address
Well, we really are not a state but we want to start legistlation to become one!
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 by T-Man | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk
As you all know WinCustomize has had more than its share of problems for the last year and especially the last few months. Unfortunately we have not been able to give WinCustomize the attention that it deserves. Two main reasons for this is because we are under staffed in our IT department and for the last several months our primary attention has been turned towards supporting the release of Galactic Civilizations II.
For many months are staff consisted of only 3 people to run WinCustomize.com, Stardock.com, TotalGaming.net, GalCiv1.com, PoliticalMachine.com, store.stardock.com, JoeUser.com, DesktopGadgets.com, SocietyGame.com, PowerUser.tv, XPThemes.com, our entire Database structure, Stardock Central Servers, all our Interal Database and Intranet needs, and of course now GalCiv2.com and its supporting sites. But in January we hired another developer (Dean) to help lighten the load. And starting next week we will have a new developer on board and by the years end we hope to hire a couple more developers. So we are expanding our staff and we really hope to get everything fixed up properly this year. So if you know of anyone who is interested in doing ASP.Net Web Development of if you are interested in it yourself and live in Michigan please send me a resume at [email protected]
While most of us were off working on GalCiv2.com, Dean has been slowly chomping away at converting WinCustomize from ASP.Net 1.14 to ASP.Net 2.0. Yesterday we launched the new version of WinCustomize. There really is not any new features with this new build of WinCustomize but there have been several tweaks to the code to improve performance and hopefully stability. Some people are already reporting speed improvements so that is a good thing. But always with updates there are always some bumps along the road as others are reporting logon issues.
Many of the logon issues were occuring during our upgrade process because of an incompatability between cookies written under the different versions of ASP.Net. If you are currently experiencing any logon/logoff issues please use this link ( https://www.wincustomize.com/killcookies.aspx ) to delete your WinCustomize cookies. After that logon/relogon and if you still experience problems please report them here.
So over the course of the next couple of weeks we will be focusing on improving the stability and speed of WinCustomize. So if you have any bugs or problems (no feature requests please) please report them here and we will do our best to get them fixed as soon as possible.
Also, we are adding additional servers to our server farm so we can load balance all of our sites better. Not just WinCustomize but all our websites. This should also help with speed and stability as well.
In a nutshell, thats where we are at and that is our plan. We do apologize for all the site problems you have been enduring and we hope to turn things around. And if we don't you have my permission to flog Dean (sorry Dean but my skin is a little sensitive and I don't want any bruises 
) ..
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Reply #62 Monday, April 17, 2006 8:58 PM
Reply #63 Monday, April 17, 2006 10:33 PM
Reply #64 Tuesday, April 18, 2006 11:27 AM
Reply #66 Tuesday, April 18, 2006 11:52 AM
Reply #67 Tuesday, April 18, 2006 12:05 PM
| And having said that, things are flying again so go figure! |
Keep talking!!
Reply #68 Tuesday, April 18, 2006 2:27 PM
Reply #69 Friday, April 21, 2006 10:15 PM
Reply #70 Saturday, April 22, 2006 12:55 AM
Reply #71 Saturday, April 22, 2006 5:10 AM
Reply #72 Saturday, April 22, 2006 8:26 AM
| So in other words...don't expect any real changes? Kinda pointless to even tell us "The big server update has arrived" if we're not going to notice any changes |
You must have slipped off this planet into an alternate space/time continuum.
It's definitely an improvement...
Reply #73 Sunday, April 23, 2006 8:00 AM
| It's definitely an improvement... |
Sorry Jafo... but I don't see any improvement. Maybe on your side of the space/time continuum, but not on mine. I still have to wait forever for pages to load and sometimes to the point of not even bothering and I go off to other sites. The only thing I don't see as much anymore are the server error pages. The main page loads in a flash...most of the time...after that it's a crap shoot. I would love to see an improvement...but its still very frustrating waiting for a page to load.
Reply #74 Sunday, April 23, 2006 11:53 AM
Haven't been logged on more than a minute or two, but the speed is fine, here.
Will try all the bells and whistles now just to see...Edits, smilies,etc...so far all better!
[Current time: Sun. a.m. 10:46 MST, @741 Internet, -7hrs UTC Greenwich]
*It may be messing w/your servers, but just to "put my foot in it and 'blow the carbon out' ",
I sometimes stab the link another time midway thru the loading process *
[wonder when/if the email-notifications'll work again...]
Reply #75 Sunday, April 23, 2006 11:55 AM
Reply #77 Monday, April 24, 2006 12:04 AM
Reply #78 Monday, April 24, 2006 5:20 PM
Reply #79 Monday, April 24, 2006 6:44 PM
Fuzzy...there was a site update...and they seem to take time to propagate....
Here [and now] it's positively zooming along....
Reply #80 Monday, April 24, 2006 6:45 PM
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Reply #61 Monday, April 17, 2006 7:55 AM
I'm still hangin in though.