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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DigitalDanes
Reply #1 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 8:18 AM
I'm not having any problems at the site, but rather my WC Browser. It's not updating and showing any new discussions for the forums for the last two days. I had to come to the website to see what new discussions were here at the forums. Any ideas what could be causing the WC Browser to not update? I perfer to use my WC Browser to read the forums and download content vs. the website. Thanks for all the hard work and welcome to Dean!
DD
ZubaZ
Reply #2 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 8:25 AM
Thanks for the update Pat.
Your kill cookies link is missing a backslash.

I'm having the same trouble as DD.

Good luck with the rest of the transition.
Dean, we're watching you.
jebro
Reply #3 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 9:00 AM
Welcome Dean.
_02
Reply #4 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:10 AM
Just to let you know, the watch list link is not working. Haven't been recieving email notifications for a day or 2!
starkers
Reply #5 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:28 AM
Thanks for the heads up, T-man...and a warm welcome to Dean

One bug I've noticed recently is the edit function being a bit iffy....sometimes it'll take 3 or 4 attempts to edit a post. Other than that, things seem to be running smoothly..... to all the SD team.
jengalan
Reply #6 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:41 AM
the site seems to have an extra boost. good work WC Team.

keep up the good work.
ZubaZ
Reply #7 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:42 AM
In addition to the problems above, I hjave not recieved my free ice cream. Please expedite it.
Fuzzy Logic
Reply #8 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 11:43 AM
The site is really fast now, but, a little bug appears to have whisked my messageboard admin tools away  
aimzzz
Reply #9 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:09 PM
a little bug appears to have whisked my messageboard admin tools away

Maybe it's not a bug...


OOP! Better go buy more chocolate eggs...
Fuzzy Logic
Reply #10 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:18 PM
Be careful, I still have my exile button...
Fuzzy Logic
Reply #11 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 2:04 PM
...got my toys back now  
T-Man
Reply #12 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 2:20 PM
It's all about the toys!  Now someone needs to give me toys.  Toys make me happy.
ZubaZ
Reply #13 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 2:26 PM
Toys make me happy


I offered beer and burgers for you and Dean in another thread [next time you are in Houston]. Find it and get here and it's yours.
Double Zero
Reply #14 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 2:44 PM
Thanks "T-Man" for the "Cookie Killer" lol..Worked like a charm so far...
I was having quite an issue with logging on even after I cleared my cache & cookies manually...
kenwas
Reply #15 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 3:20 PM
The update is appreciated and welcome aboard to Dean!
Lantec
Reply #16 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:29 PM
Just being able to stay online at this time of day is a major improvement.
kenwas
Reply #17 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:35 PM
Is it intentional that we have to log in every time we come to the site if we have NOT logged out the visit before ? I used to be able to leave myself logged in and not have to go through the login process every visit to the site. That is no longer the case.
WebGizmos
Reply #18 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:54 PM
still have to log in each time I come back to the site...also second attempt at posting this.
Island Dog
Reply #19 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 6:03 PM

I still have no way to post images.

Html does not work, nor does the [img] tags.

Thanks for all the work you do.

WebGizmos
Reply #20 Wednesday, April 12, 2006 6:05 PM
Also...site is back to a crawl...actually more than a crawl...was running great for part of the day though. Also...can't edit posts and it takes several tries before any show up.

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