This web site has got to be one of the worse lifestyle sites on the net. How this goes on with all the glitches and issues is beyond me. What a mess….. Shame on you SLS you’re embarrassing yourselves and letting your paying customers down!
Have you considered hiring from within the SLS membership? I'm sure there are plenty of folks with the necessary skills
Of course there is. A lot of sites advertise the jobs they want to hire people for, on their site for people to see! Novel concept, right?
So someone knowingly accepts a job in IT at a Swingers website and is offended by the content. This is the most g-rated swinger site there is. You can’t even use the term gangbang in a profile. I find that difficult to believe. I guess we are to believe that this is the most complicated of all websites on the World Wide Web. There are no doubt millions of website but all the ones I use, swinger or not, never have problems. I don’t know what capacity Wayne is in this company but if he’s not the owner, he’s been hung out to dry. He’s the only connection we have to the powers that be so he takes all of our crap. Obviously he’s not the fix it guy. Apparently just the mouthpiece.
Ringo - Hell, if I was working on it, the fact that it was a sex site would be a bonus ;-)
Here is my guess:
Wayne - "If I recall, there was one person we hired that quit after a day or two because they could not handle the content."
Have you considered hiring from within the SLS membership? I'm sure there are plenty of folks with the necessary skills. They'd have knowledge of the lifestyle, wouldn't be offended by swinging (obviously), and would probably haved experienced the site's myriad problems first hand. You already use members to screen profiles and Hot Dates, so it must not be "against policy".
Wayne - "If I recall, there was one person we hired that quit after a day or two because they could not handle the content."
Going back to this being database related and seeing that it was SQL Server as far as I could tell from error screens I hit randomly, you'd think that they'd be spending most of their time running and analyzing SQL traces and DMVStats queries to identify the issues.
Additionally, if this was Windows-based, they'd be looking at Perfmon stats if you had no other system resource metric tools in place, as well as SQL and Windows App logs. None of this would involve having to look at any content, so seems odd that someone would have an issue with content to do their job in this particular area. I can see it being a general morality issue for some, considering what the site is used for.
What does the content have to do with it if they are fixing issues related to the site working correctly. Why would any of the so called computer experts even be reading anything anyone would have their profile?
"If I recall, there was one person we hired that quit after a day or two because they could not handle the content."
Wayne, still goes back to money. Pay me enough money and I will not mind looking at dicks all day long! :)
<p>"<span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:open sans,sans-serif; font-size:14px">Take all that money we gave you expecting a functional website, and hire an army of developers"</span></p>
<p><font color="#000000" face="open sans, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14px">As I understand it, it is not a coding issue. It is database related.</span></font></p>
<p><font color="#000000" face="open sans, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14px">As far as hiring people, that isn't as easy as some of you seem to think it is. We have found highly qualified people, explained the nature of the job and offered them the job and they turned it down due to it being a swingers site. If I recall, there was one person we hired that quit after a day or two because they could not handle the content.</span></font></p>
moekathy - "Not enough resources are being put into the improvements."
If you have an electrical problem, throwing an army of plumbers at it doesn't help ;-) Not saying that's the case. I'm basically agreeing with you that anyone on the outside really doesn't know what they're dealing with. It does feel like they at least have a lack of the "correct" resources to throw at it or things like the new mail counter would have been fixed by now.
I have seen a lot of theories why the site is broken. Unless you have actually worked on it, they remain mere theories. However, there is one certain fact: Not enough resources are being put into the improvements. While money can't buy you happiness, it can buy you a functioning web site.
G8torNmike - Honestly, I don't think it is as easy as you think. If they are experiencing intermittant load related issues, than you need load to be able to reproduce the problems. Currently those problems are obviously not well understood. Troubleshooting usually yields a lot about what the problems aren't, and not necessarily what the problems are.
To do proper load testing, you need a seperate test environment. The heart of SLS is the database, and to fully exercise it requires driving the app at load AND doing both reads and writes to the DB. You can't be creating writes into actual user's accounts so you'd need to create a substantial # of test users (1000's), not to mention scripting out the workflows and creating the proper rate/mix of transactions to recreate the problems.
By appearances looking from the outside in, they appear to have capacity issues, so I suspect they either have no test environment or a very limited one. In any event, it's likely not as easy as shutting down the site and releasing an army of coders. Even good coders can take months to ramp up and become familiar with a code base. It's not like building a road where you just shut it down and release an army of construction workers.
I realize this is all frustrating, but I don't think that the average person understands what they are likely dealing with. That could be my case as well, but my current job is along the lines of tasks I mentioned above, so I at least have a clue of what they're looking at. I'm not defending them because it shouldn't have been allowed to get to this point in the first place, but if they are actually still getting that many new members, it could be that this caught them off guard and they are a product of their own success.
If they don't get it fixed, their success may be short lived. As a lifetime free member, I hope not.
It seems obvious to everyone but the admins that there are major problems. It also seems that a competent business person would do whatever it took to fix this site. So here is my 2¢
Take all that money we gave you expecting a functional website, and hire an army of developers from Fiverr. Give them the code for the section they will be working on 3-4 weeks out from a prechosen day. On that day, the website gets taken down, the army is unleashed and the site/app work and it comes back online
You now have happy customers who will be more likely to visit the advertisers making more money
Seems simple to most of us.
" it has gotten much better than it was in November"
Well, we are like a week away from hitting the 4-month mark of the message counter not working (I believe it started Thanksgiving weekend)
I don’t know that it’s gotten much better since November, but maybe some aspects that we don’t use have improved and we don’t notice. That being said, I appreciate the honest answer. Thank you
<p>"<span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:open sans,sans-serif; font-size:14px">how about answering the question that the people have been asking for months/years. When is this site going to start functioning properly?"</span></p>
<p><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:open sans,sans-serif; font-size:14px">I honestly do not know the answer to that. I can't predict the future. No one can. The exact cause has not been pinpointed. That is what they are working on and trying to figure out. They have made many updates and from my own experience in using the site, it has gotten much better than it was in November. </span></p>
“ This site is primarily and foremost a site for swingers.”
That’s great, it’s the reason we signed up. To meet other people like us. So let’s set aside the petty bullshit about advertisers and how many folks sign up every week, how about answering the question that the people have been asking for months/years. When is this site going to start functioning properly? That’s what the swingers on here have been asking and they are the primary reason for this site (your words). So, when will the site start working properly?
<p>"<span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:tahoma,verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:14px">Wayne does not dispute my assertion that the site is primaraly and foremost an advertising platform."</span></p>
<p><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:tahoma,verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:14px">This site is primarily and foremost a site for swingers. Clubs and Groups and their events and parties are part of that. Many of our members come here to look for events to attend. Some of those ads are paid for and some of them are part of the VIP program, which is free for clubs that meet the requirements. </span></p>
<p><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:tahoma,verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:14px">As far as the old profiles, it would cost resources to constantly poll the site and remove unused profiles. And some of those peope do come back to the site once in a while, even after 10 years. If you are seeing those, they are probably in your Friends or Favorites list or maybe in a Group member list. You can remove those from your Friends and Favorites list and Group owners can remove those from their group list, if they so choose.</span></p>
There might be new members on here weekly but how long do you really think they are going to stay once they see what kind of crappy site this is?
You may be able to review the newly listed members as Wayne suggests but there is no independent auditing of actual membership, paid or otherwise. I have clicked on profiles that havent been on the site for over 3000 days( you do the math) yet still count as members. Interesting too is that Wayne does not dispute my assertion that the site is primaraly and foremost an advertising platform. That portion of the site operates at a much higher degree then membership/options because it is where the money is made!
The home page will also tell you how many members are online. When that number gets north of 7K and approaches 8K is when the site is more apt to misbehave. That's consistent with Fridays and Saturdays being among the worst days.
That's not to say you can't have problems besides those times, but my anecdotal evidence suggests that they have capacity related issues. In more robust infrastructures they allow alerts to automatically trigger horizontal scaling (spinning up new servers) to handle the load. I suspect that is not being done in this case and the system is not sized properly for the peak loads they experience. That, or there is some sort of other bottleneck, like network/disk I/O.
<p>"<span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:tahoma,verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:14px">SLS claims that today there are almost 12,000 new members, its on the log on page. That may or may not be true..."</span></p>
<p><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:tahoma,verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:14px">You can go to the homepage and click on the "New This Week" link to see a list of all those profiles. You can see and view every one of them.</span></p>
<p> </p>
I think everyone has the idea that this site exists so people can meet other like minded people. In my view that is secondary to the real purpose which is to sell advertising. The real money maker! In media, numbers of viewers, subscribers, etc are verified by auditing organizations, Arbitron, Neilson, TAB to name few well known ones. SLS claims that today there are almost 12,000 new members, its on the log on page. That may or may not be true but looks good to someone wanting to fill a cruise ship. Our paid memberships are secondary and members are treated for what they are, a number used to hike the advertising rate.
funny we have not heard anything from wayne lately or anyone else for that fact, they probably took everyones money and went on vacation
