Fix the website already

@1Aplha: there is no new site coming. Wayne confirmed the rebrand is nothing more than just the new swing dot com home page and name with the new logo animation. This is it.

There's multiple reasons why the site is a mess and failing.

-Site edits are done on the live website, not a test server
-old coding that most likely no is familiar with - remember Macromedia has been out of business since 2005
-Lack of server capacity
-lack of bandwidth
-lack of actual developer/tech staff

Add some or all of these up and you end where we are at right now. Best thing to do would be to deprecate this site once a new one is launched and developed instead of patching , breaking, patching and breaking over and over again.

Unfortunately it seems like the website itself can't handle being used and improved at the same time maybe go for a site wide day where no one is allowed to log in for 12-24 hours in order to make improvements and test the way it operates without the continued use of the site. I have no idea how it operates just figured a outside idea might help.

Today’s been full of iron gate errors and all of our messages disappearing with the “you have no messages” dialog. This site is such a disappointment but you already have our money.

Ok the weekend is over. The site should go back to working 98% of the time. It isn't. I can't open my messages. I get Recipients name and that is it. This is totally ridiculous that these problems can't be corrected. You need to scrap this POS site and start anew.

If you all remember when they were offline for days..

... and deleted forum posts when you asked in the forum if the servers were compromised? I remember.

If you all remember when they were offline for days....just remember if you know how poor the website it in operation, imagine how bad the security is.

We do not, and never would, put one single piece of identifiable information on the site.

Just got a stack dump with the following error - "[Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver]Connection reset by peer: socket write error"

This really sounds like some sort of network related issue talking to the DB server/s. Networking is kind of it's own little niche/world, and it wouldn't surprise me that SLS doesn't really have someone that is strong with that skill set. It would explain why these sorts of issues have persisted for so long.

Where they are using SQL server, it seems likely they may be using the integrated replication to keep multiple servers in sync, and if things have to talk to each other over different networks like I suspect, it makes finding/fixing this even harder.

I noticed that they turned off the session polling again yesterday. I left myself logged in last night and was still logged in this morning. Perhaps it will be a regular weekend thing till they figure out how to correct the performance issues.

Not sure if anyone else noticed, but the unread Forum post counters are a bit whacked. For example, you'll see a topic has 5 unread posts and you read them, but when you go from the topic back to the main forum level it doesn't always register that you've read the posts. Then, if you refresh your browser, it may or may not clear the unread post indicator.

I can't tell, but I suspect that the site is running on on-prem physical hardware. That means it's can't really scale up dynamically. There was mention about how complicated things are, but complicated is a relative term. For example, you could have software running in Docker containers that are running on a Kubernetes cluster. Companies have infrastructure to automatically build and test code changes and if it passes, deploy it through a test stack and into Live.

You can further complicate things by having a hybrid system where some of it is on-prem and the rest is in the cloud. The cloud stuff can be set up to monitor resources and automatically scale capacity up or down as needed. Now THAT is complicated, but I tend to doubt that is what SLS is running on.

Ridiculous. It's either incompetence or a money grab with no intention of fixing it. Likely time to cancel and move on. They have earned enough of my money to continue to be plagued with the same issues year over year.

Comical

In MY opinion, what RealINDiscreet said 2 days ago and what CandBmn said makes more sense then any explanations I have read from SLS employees. It appears "The technology of this site is much more complex then any of you seem to understand" feels more like it is obviously to complex for the current SLS developers to fix.

Sure... the site is "complex"... but that's no excuse. SLS is dead simple compared to many others.

The folks who really know what they're doing never use "It's super complicated" as an excuse for not getting it done. What's "complicated" to them is merely "interesting" to somebody who actually understands.

Consider Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Google, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. Those sites support many MILLIONS of users at a time, with more features, more functionality, a slick user-friendly interface, and they work fast and reliably almost all of the time. That kind of performance is what people have come to expect, and that is today's competition.

I see there are some coldfusion developers on Fiverr who get good reviews and will contract for cheap.

Quite honestly we shouldn’t have to be tasked to try and understand if a site is complex or not. As a user we expect the site to run when we try to use it. It’s the developers job to make issues are fixed. Seems there’s alot of excuses as to the inability to run a site. One thing after another is broken. Why we all ask? Because the people who are working on it have no clue. Other sites run fine with minimal issues. That’s why we use others now. Takes getting used to but the people who run this site seem to not care.

corky - "Name something that performs better when you turn it off. "

There are a number of things that can affect site performance, though turning them off may only be a temporary measure, if even then.

Polling for inactive sessions. This is usually a scheduled process that runs every so often and logs out inactive users. Other sites that I'm on do not have this. It's a trade off. Inactive users consume resources that get freed up when they're logged out, but the job doing this consumes resources as well.

Polling for updates. Anything that polls for changes to display will also consume resources, like checking to see if you have messges.

Additional/higher level logging. Applications can be set up with various levels of logging. Higher levels of logging consume more resources and can slow things down. Same with monitoring. For example, running SQL traces on a live database can be somewhat intrusive, as are a number of tools used to monitor a running system.

Synthetic transactions/load tests. Some companies do testing against their Live system. Usually this is limited, but if things are slowing down, it is suspect and can be turned off.

Virus/Malware programs. These absolutely can slow things down, though you wouldn't want to just turn them off. They are a necessary evil, but sometimes there are updates to these that cause unexpected resource contention issues.

Though Mail was mentioned, it did not actually go away. It is just limited to owners of groups to advertise LS events. There are other parts of SLS like the Forums and Chat that likely also consume common resources and turning those off could have impact, as well as things like Hot Dates, and anything really that consumes common system resources.

These are just a few things I can think of off the top of my head.

I’m trying to think of one thing in this universe where performance improves when it is turned off. Let’s make a game of it. Name something that performs better when you turn it off. Mail counter is already taken.

SLS ??

It isn't hard to understand that the underlying database infrastructure can't stand up to a simple

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM messages WHERE status=unread;

Like every other single counter coded on the planet.

Anything with an electrical system manufactured by Lucas, Prince of Darkness. :)

“ The mail counter turned off is certainly annoying and it is unfortunate that our developers have to keep turning it off to improve performance”

I’m trying to think of one thing in this universe where performance improves when it is turned off. Let’s make a game of it. Name something that performs better when you turn it off. Mail counter is already taken.

i would just like to know if my messages are actually being read or if people get them, i have replied to many messages and never heard from them again. so is it the site or are we just undesirable to others.

From Wayne, the problems are much more complex than we simpletons can understand. Apparently their people can’t either! The other site don’t have these problems.

Things that make you go hmm- “I wonder if SLS owns any of their competitors??”

Wayne, we keep hearing the issues are going to be solved but actions speak louder than words. We’ve seen no real progress in months. I’ve been here for three years and the only thing I’ve seen upgraded or added was the wall nobody uses and the chat had to be upgraded due to the end of life for the plug-in, but that was a disaster for months too. It’s still having issues regularly. How long does it take to see real differences?

<p><a href="https://www.swinglifestyle.com/profile/lookup.cfm?usercode=63840312">RealNDiscreet</a>,</p>

<p>We are continuing to work to get the underlying issues resolved. The technology of this site is much more complex than any of you seem to understand. </p>

<p>The mail counter turned off is certainly annoying and it is unfortunate that our developers have to keep turning it off to improve performance, but that is not stopping anyone from sending and receiving messages. And you can just select the "Messages" tab to check for new mail. If you are forgetting to do that, you can go to "Tools" and "Manage Homepage" and set your "Mailbox" as your homepage and then it will load to that page every time and you will have a new mail counter showing there.</p>

<p>We are not going to start changing site policy (to allow contact info in the profile) because the site does not work right. We are going to put our efforts into getting the issues figured out and corrected. </p>

RND - "At the least they should let people post off-site contact info in their profile, so we can at least communicate with each other."

The problem is that they allow free accounts. If someone with a free account could post outside contact info, they'd never need to pay. If they eliminate the free accounts, they'd stand a snowball's chance in hell of signing up new "paying" members.

They could let only paid members post outside contact info and, in theory, they'd only have to police the free accounts for outside contact info instead of all of the profile changes like they do now. The drawback is if you pay for a month and then lapse to a free member, someone would have to come back and police that profile.

There is no easy fix to this as far as I can see. The best fix is to have a well working site so that SLS members aren't turning away new members because of all the site issues.