VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION General Discussions Appreciation

NOTE: Bill Barker is “BLOCKED” from this thread!!!!!!!


A personal account of the past two and one half weeks. Read on.

I was off from work the week of Christmas. On Tuesday the 23rd I tried to get to the VCCA web site. The site would not come up. I thought, maybe site trouble, will try later. Well this continued through the up coming weekend.

Monday back at work I could bring up the site, note post by me in General Discussion, “Outage”. Thought all is well. Later at home, still no site. I then sent Ken48 a e-mail with a trace route to forward to Bill Barker explaining that, to me, it looked like I was being blocked.

Now, rather than telling the remainder of the agonizing next eight days, I will jump ahead to January 6th. I received a e-mail from Bill that the problem was resolved. It turned out that in fact my IP address had been inadvertently included in a group of blocked IP addresses.

What became very apparent through this long drawn out ordeal and my communications with Bill is the many hours and headaches incurred, 13 years worth, to keep this site available to all. Also, with NO compensation. Which brings up the question, how do YOU feel about this?

No matter how inflated his ego must be, at the very least, how about a “Donate” button on this site. Come on people, ideas!!!! Not talking “tax bracket” changing stuff, or a “plaque” to hang on the wall, but.......................?

Russel
At the risk of sounding like another joker on this site.
I suspect your IP may have come out of China which I believe Bill has totally banned.
Tony

While we all appreciate Bill's enormous contributions perhaps payment would then make his efforts seen as "work" and we would be spoiling all his "fun". Maybe he could deduct his contributions on his IRS tax report as a "charitable contribution".

I might have to LOCK this thread if you keep mentioning money!! :-)

I manage the CHAT activities because I think that it provides a significant service for the club, especially the International folks. And the club has allowed me a lot of flexibility over the past 13+ years to control it without a lot of beaucratic overhead. So, I think that it has been a win-win.

What Russ was referring to is the extra "personal" support that I find myself being involved in more and more. His specific problem was very unusual because we both had suspicions at the beginning as to what the cause was. But because of our hosting contract, I am very reluctant to cry wolf to them without some preliminary evidence.... By not having on-demand support, we save over $500 a month on our service. Russ was affected in a manner that has NEVER occurred here before. But, it still took us (him, especially) almost 10 days or so, to remove all other possibilities. That was very frustrating for him (and me!!)...


I can tell you that 99.99% of all help requests that I receive are usually some kind of local configuration, hardware or software issue at the USERS end of the pipeline. Once in a great while it'll be their internet provider. The performance issues that we've had with our host have been almost primarily LOAD issues - and always caused by other clients within our "space". The result is that we either are UP (and running) or DOWN (on our butts). Nothing in between. That's the nature of the service.

But 13,000 different PC's, Mac's, Kindles, Cell Phone, etc all interact with Chat in a different way. And that's the tough part of being on this end of the pipeline and trying to help people resolve their problems.


I'm getting off track -- but I just want to thank anyone, and everyone, who appreciates the difficulties of supporting 13,000 users here. The Technical issues I enjoy resolving. The people ones, not so much.


Sometime in the the next couple of years, the VCCA will need to find a new ADMINISTRATOR for Chat. In the meantime, I'm willing to put up with it a little bit longer.

Thanks Russ.

Yes, you are quite right, BBB. Referring to us International members/users and the importance of the VCCA forum, running 24/7 for years with your and the moderators help. Thanks, also to all contributors here for what they add to the forum in many directions, both as to the Chevrolet part and lots of others.

I hope you will be running the web site for many years to come. We have a SUPER CHEVROLET SERVICE on this site!!!

Thank you Bill. It's kind generous folks like you that make me want to renew my VCCA membership.

Stay well and healthy!!

Rick