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 #82 Wednesday, April 26, 2006 12:00 PM
Reply #83 Wednesday, April 26, 2006 3:51 PM
Reply #84 Thursday, April 27, 2006 5:57 PM
Reply #85 Friday, April 28, 2006 6:40 AM
Reply #86 Friday, April 28, 2006 10:50 AM
...hit 'Submit...
fast results, but took me to "You are not allowed:(..." page
and signed me out in the process.
Hit 'Back', was still signed in, but comment had gone to comment heaven
[aren't we lucky to live in the 'online age'?
]Thanks for the progress so far, WC
Reply #87 Saturday, April 29, 2006 8:12 PM
Reply #89 Monday, May 1, 2006 3:29 AM
WC does seem to be going to sleep periodically. By 'going to sleep' I mean I will be cruising right along reading this, looking at that, and BAM, no response for about 5 minutes or so. Sometimes I get the timeout error page, sometimes the page I clicked on loads after a lengthy delay. After a bit, it's back to quick and fast only to nod off again.
Very annoying!
Reply #90 Monday, May 1, 2006 4:26 AM
Reply #91 Monday, May 1, 2006 11:30 PM
but I did finally make it. Maybe some "pseudo-official" participants can be an extension for the stardock staff. That would keep the other 498,000 of us from saying "me too." I would like to provide good feedback, but don't want to add to the noise. Having been on the other side of the wire most of my career, I can appreciate the kind of headaches you guys are having at this point. Thanks for the good work. Let us know how we can best help. Here is an interesting link for state of the network by region... Internet Traffic Report
Reply #92 Wednesday, May 3, 2006 6:57 AM
Reply #93 Thursday, May 4, 2006 9:50 AM
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(HttpWorkerRequest wr, Boolean silent) +395
#91: What he said
The loading times get me to wander in my mind, I started thinking about all the servers, network hand-shakes, passing-on of my keyboard commands, bits, bytes, flip-flops, stack requests......I'm lucky the whole thing ever works at all
Reply #94 Thursday, May 4, 2006 9:56 AM
Thanks for the great link!
ms response time, packet-loss... wild!
makes you wonder...in a demographic sorta way
Reply #95 Thursday, May 4, 2006 1:37 PM
Seldomseen, Did you notice the cool traffic report client you can run? Thats how they get their numbers. They also have code snippets for web pages (check the side bar for links).
Reply #96 Thursday, May 4, 2006 1:57 PM
Reply #97 Thursday, May 4, 2006 2:13 PM
Thanks for the link! I'll go check out the traffic report first thing!
kenwas,
Me, too. Just got back from skinnalicious and skinartistry, and they're faster. I'm surfing...seeing if I got the right graphics app for the complete noob: Corel PSP X at Best Buy $99. Said I could return it if I don't break the seal.
Apologies for stomping on the thread. I'll never do it again
Reply #98 Thursday, May 4, 2006 2:19 PM
Reply #99 Thursday, May 4, 2006 2:23 PM
The site is about as fast as a sloth on sleeping tablets.
Seems to me the speed was lost the day the post edit feature was put back... could be a co-incidence, but there was a noticable drop in speed from a week last Monday onwards
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Reply #81 Tuesday, April 25, 2006 6:49 AM
It's very fast now. Although I still cannot post images or html.