FREEBMD-SYNDICATES-L Archives

From: Dave Mayall <>
Subject: Site errors - the definitive guide to dealing with them
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:15:27 +0000

As co-ordinators will doubtless be aware, the past few weeks have seen an
irritating rise in the number of site problems.

This means that it is probably a good time to pass some advice via co-
ordinators on how transcribers can help us to help them...

1) Don't rush to report an error.
On many occassions, we see cases where a known outage to the site which lasted
less than five minutes produced dozens of e-mails reporting errors.

We don't have 24/7 support for the site, and this means that errors will
sometimes persist overnight (or on occasion all weekend), but transcribers can
be assured that when we come back to our computers one of the first things that
we do (often before reading mail) is to check whether the site is stable.

Dozens of e-mails aren't going to get the thing fixed more quickly.

As a rule of thumb, unless a problem persists beyond 11:00 (GMT) on the next
working day, it is too soon to report it.

2) Check on-site messages before reporting errors.
Where we have a problem that we can't fix immediately, we try to put a message
up so that people can see we are aware.

If we are aware of a problem, additional reports of that problem are not going
to help us fix it!

3) When reporting a problem, give FULL details.
"There was an error, and it said to report it"
"Cannot access FreeBMD"
"Error message searching"
"I got an error message about xxx"
are all typical error reports.

If you decide that it is appropriate to report an error, then give full
details. Reports that fail to include full information, or attempt to
paraphrase the error message just mean that somebody has to read an e-mail that
isn't going to get us anywhere.

I'll be producing a summary of the current status of the website and known
issues later today, and over the next week or so, a co-ordinators guide to
common error messages.

--
Dave Mayall

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