Re: history of claranet

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:26:08 +0000, Nick Sellors <nbls@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 14:36:58 +0000 (UTC), Eps
><bill.gates@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Claranews - biggest bunch of wankers the world has seen - years on,
still lies, bullshit, and two fingers to customers - a month on after
they made changes to the system and problems occurred, they still have
done sod all to fix it - here's an excerpt from the closed(?) group.

someone wrote:
>> So we've received two replies from Clara after weeks of silence. Both
>> replies are appreciated. However they've both failed to answer the
>> basic questions that have been asked.
>>
>> So I'll ask them once again and would appreciate honest and
>> satisfactory answers.
>

Reply (after many weeks of silence from claranews support - what a
joke that is)

>The common datapoint seems to be "many groups" and "two weeks" -
>this is a bit of a yarn, for which I apologise in advance -
>
>Approximately two weeks ago we began testing a new set of resilient
>filestore equipment - with the intention that we incorporate it into
>the next generation news service.
>
>A "mini" version of the TNG service was built around that resilient
>filestore, and taking some of the most heavy-traffic groups -
>boneless, multimedia, dvd, for example - we started feeding those
>groups to the mini service and configured the primary service
>to fetch those groups from the mini.
>
>Now - it's worth stressing that the test of the filestore itself
>has been successful. Under non-service testbed load it's proven itself
>capable of performing as well as or better than the current service
>has ever managed - under "in service" testing it's coped with the
>demands being put upon it with grunt to spare. We've pulled/failed
>disks on it with no dataloss on the filesystems and everything's
>been hunky-dory.
>
>At the moment it looks like this group - possibly others - are being
>affected by some kind of configuration issue with the news server
>software running on the boxes the filestore is attached to.
>
>As I understand it, people are reporting that they can see retrieve
>headers for specific articles but not the bodies in some instances -
>and having tried to replicate that with a news client I took one part
>of the "mini" service out yesterday, since it seemed to be behaving
>a bit oddly.
>
>What I'd like to be clear on here is whether that is the problem
>you're complaining about, or whether you're saying that headers and
>bodies both, for specific articles, are missing here but are present
>elsewhere. At the moment I have a pretty-flat graph showing the
>groups we're monitoring - including multimedia - as between 97 and
>99% complete - which generally means things are fairly healthy.
>
>Now - we've got most, if not all, of the datapoints we require out
>of the mini-service - as a trial of the hardware it's passed with
>flying colours. I can back this out such that we're running with
>the servers on the primary service fairly trivially. Before I do
>that I would be very interested in knowing whether this issue is
>apparent on say, boneless or dvd.
>
>A lot of the focus at the moment, probably most where news is
>concerned, is in addressing the long-term issues - resilience,
>performance, and retention in particular.
>
>I hope this goes some way towards answering your questions.

Latest the past 24 hours from a customer - not me, but others that
have posted asking why they treat customers like shit.

>>

Thanks for the reply Dave. It's this sort of feedback which is
appreciated.

As others have already pointed out the problems represents itself as
some kind of filtering. Thousands of posts just don't appear at all in
the headers. We're not talking about incomplete posts since a non
existant post on your server can hardly be incomplete. The posts just
aren't there. This is not to say the groups are totally empty sicne
there are new posts appearing. It's just that not all the posts are
appearing, hence people saying that the groups are being filtered. A
quick comparison of the headers between Claras news servers and say
EasyNews or GigaNews will quickly show you what is going wrong.

Example:

Post A exists on EasyNews. It doesn't exist on ClaraNews.
Post B exists on EasyNews. It doesn't exist on ClaraNews.
Post C exists on EasyNews. It doesn't exist on ClaraNews.
Post D exists on EasyNews. It doesn't exist on ClaraNews.
Post E exists on EasyNews. It doesn't exist on ClaraNews.

I'm sure you get the idea.

Hope that helps.

Lastly, while it's good to know that you have had some success with
testing the new News system, the one thing I didn't like hearing is
that you used paying customers as Beta Testers without their
permission. A beta test that appears to have resulted in the very
problems that are now affecting us paying customers!

Why is it that when you want beta testers for you other products you
ask for volunteers, yet with the news servers you just treated every
paying customer as a beta tester without our permission or knowledge?
Which is still resulting in problems that have not been fixed.
Problems which you remained totally silent on for weeks.

Claranews users are fed up of being treated so poorly. You ask other
groups to volunteer for beta testing, but you foist it upon us without
our permission or knowledge. The current problems started because you
implemented a untested system live on users.

I would like to know why you treated us paying customers as Beta
Testers without our permission or knowledge, and also what you plan to
do to rectify that to our satisfaction.

It's now almost a month sincc the problems started appearing.

How long do you intend to hold us hostage as Beta Testers without our
permission?

Also, why do you see it as being acceptable to ask other groups to
volunteer Beta Testers, but not for ClaraNews. If other groups were
given the respect of volunteering then how come ClaraNews users
weren't given that respect?
.