Why Can't I Post?

[THORDOOR220]

No, I still had it in my clipboard from copying and retrying before so I was working with that

[Casey]

  On 8/10/2018 at 10:07 PM, THORDOOR220 said:

No, I still had it in my clipboard from copying and retrying before so I was working with that

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I'm not specifically asking about this particular time, but in general, do you usually compose the body of your message elsewhere, then copy and paste it into the reply box here on the forum?

[THORDOOR220]

  On 8/10/2018 at 10:52 PM, Casey said:

I'm not specifically asking about this particular time, but in general, do you usually compose the body of your message elsewhere, then copy and paste it into the reply box here on the forum?

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Nope, I type it here

[smhardesty]

It doesn't appear that any of the moderators, administrators, owners, or other powers that be are too worried about helping you with your problem. I'd try and help you, but I have no access to the forum that would allow me to do so. I took you as far as I could and managed to get the correct piece of information to help those powers that be resolve the issue, but then no one decided to pick the ball up and run with it. Kinda sad, really.

[Dave Ambrose]

We’ve been struggling with this issue for a while. I think I have a way to get the necessary diagnostic data, but I’ve been in the hospital twice in the last month or so, and need to get better before I can tackle that problem and a few others. 

I will get to it, but I cannot right now.  

[smhardesty]

Sorry to hear of your health issues. That being said, this is exactly the situation I pointed out in the past on a different thread. I've actually brought it to light a few times. You just CAN'T have one, single person in complete control of a forum of this size. Moderators need additional capabilities to begin with, then there needs to be a minimum of two, if not three or four, with full control of the forum. 

Thankfully it sounds like you'll be recovering from your medical condition in a short time, but what if this had been a much more serious event that left you unable to continue? Who is going to be expected to instantly step in, know everything he needs to know, and then enthusiastically accept the problems and responsibilities?

Not only this particular problem, but I have seen comments made on various threads about the huge back log of maintenance and problems. On a forum like this, there should NEVER be a back log consisting of more than two or three items, and it shouldn't last more than a week to ten days. I posted a comment two or three months ago about removing the reference to www.eModelCars.com from the Trading Post description. I was told there is only one individual with the capability of editing a board's description. Kind of blew my socks off. That information however, did explain why so many "housekeeping" chores have been neglected for so long.

Maybe you guys should consider placing one or two more individuals in the roll of Admin with full privileges and then modifying the privileges of the Moderators to allow them to take care of simple things like removing that dead reference in the Trading Post description. 

Just a thought.

[peteski]

That is all well and good Steve, but who will pay their salaries?  IT admins don't work for peanuts.   Looks like Dave is dealing with a technical problem, not just watching over the forum for bad language, trolling,  or threads in the wrong sections.  Finding volunteers willing to do IT work for free is not that easy.  It also takes knowledge to do some of the technical work needed to administer the forum's database, the front end, and web servers. Plus if you have multiple admins, things can end up badly (especially when they don't communicate well with each other).    I work in tech support and I see all sorts of horror stories (even in large companies) because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.  Talk is cheap - are you volunteering?

Edited August 21, 2018 by peteski

[smhardesty]

Nope. I am not volunteering. I spent over 30 years in the industry. In more than one situation I managed a staff of IT personel. I never had a problem with the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. That could be a result of management or a result of excellent hiring practices.

You state you work in tech support and see all sorts of horror stories due to miscommunication. There should NEVER be any miscommunication in an IT department. Every trouble call should be directed to the IT manager, or depending on the size of the department, to an assistant manager. The trouble call should then be routed to a specific technician who is directed to resolve the issue and also to remain in tight communication with the manager, who is then ultimately responsible to see that the problem is brought to successful resolution in an appropriate amount of time. If the departments you have worked in don't do this, I understand why you would be familiar with horror stories.

But before we start discussing management and staff, let's first address the problem of salaries. Are you telling me that all the moderators and the single Admin on this forum are paid employees or contractors? Do you know that for a fact? If so, do you know what they are each being paid? If you can't answer yes to those questions then you're simply attempting to cloud the real issues with smoke. Fact is, I have no idea how many Admins or moderators are being paid, but I'll venture out on a limb and suggest that none of the moderators are paid employees.

One further note regarding paid IT support. The position we would be discussing would actually run more along the lines of a webmaster or site creator. In case you're unfamiliar with how those people work, they don't get up, get dressed, and go into a building to go to work. The vast majority are independent contractors that work from home, never even meeting the person(s) they are working for. By doing that they can accept multiple contracts from various businesses and make a very handsome income while charging each business they work for far less than a full time employee would cost. At times the difference is from one fourth to even one tenth as much or even more depending on what is expected of them.

The bottom line is that I don't believe there is a major problem, or any problem at all, in finding volunteers to serve as moderators or even to volunteer as full blown Admins. I have been either an Admin or a Moderator on several different forums over the years, mostly on IT related forums. I'm a full blown Admin on one site right now with 3 other full blown Admins and never once has any of us done anything that irritated the others. I'm also aware of at least 2 other forums with multiple Admins and those forums seem to run flawlessly.

 

[Rob Hall]

i can relate to issues w/ IT and technology, I've been a software engineer for 20+ years, and done quite a bit of system administration and production support in that time...all sorts of corporate environments, from tiny 4 person startups to Fortune 500 companies---everything from being a full time employee to a W2 contractor, a corp-to-corp contractor, and 1099 independent.   One thing I learned long ago is never to do volunteer work; every hour has to be billable at a good rate.

[THORDOOR220]

  On 8/21/2018 at 4:05 PM, Rob Hall said:

i can relate to issues w/ IT and technology, I've been a software engineer for 20+ years, and done quite a bit of system administration and production support in that time...all sorts of corporate environments, from tiny 4 person startups to Fortune 500 companies---everything from being a full time employee to a W2 contractor, a corp-to-corp contractor, and 1099 independent.   One thing I learned long ago is never to do volunteer work; every hour has to be billable at a good rate.

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While i do support more administrators, this is true, for more than one reason. As a plumber and someone that's worked on cars for years, I've learned pretty quick that one 'small favor' can lead to a lot of your time being taken advantage of. I don't have an answer to the salary issue, and I'm not a tech guy, but it would be nice to have a second guy just in case. But for now, I suppose we have to work with what's here, and if that means a longer wait? Well, we all have the patience to build tiny cars, so I think we have the patience for this.

[Badluck 13]

Yeah I am in it for the money  ....

[dshue76]

I tried posting is this thread, and I get a 404 error.

• Model Cars 
•  
• Car Kit News & Reviews 
•  
• 1/18 MPC Hydro-Vee Boat

[dshue76]

This is what I tried to post and it wouldn't post here either.

[smhardesty]

  On 8/22/2018 at 5:15 PM, dshue76 said:

I tried posting is this thread, and I get a 404 error.

• Model Cars 
•  
• Car Kit News & Reviews 
•  
• 1/18 MPC Hydro-Vee Boat

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I would have tried to help you out, but it has been made pretty clear that my help is neither wanted or appreciated.

Good luck with any type help!

Edited August 22, 2018 by smhardesty

[peteski]

  On 8/21/2018 at 3:47 PM, smhardesty said:

Nope. I am not volunteering. I spent over 30 years in the industry. In more than one situation I managed a staff of IT personel. I never had a problem with the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. That could be a result of management or a result of excellent hiring practices.

You state you work in tech support and see all sorts of horror stories due to miscommunication. There should NEVER be any miscommunication in an IT department. Every trouble call should be directed to the IT manager, or depending on the size of the department, to an assistant manager. The trouble call should then be routed to a specific technician who is directed to resolve the issue and also to remain in tight communication with the manager, who is then ultimately responsible to see that the problem is brought to successful resolution in an appropriate amount of time. If the departments you have worked in don't do this, I understand why you would be familiar with horror stories.

But before we start discussing management and staff, let's first address the problem of salaries. Are you telling me that all the moderators and the single Admin on this forum are paid employees or contractors? Do you know that for a fact? If so, do you know what they are each being paid? If you can't answer yes to those questions then you're simply attempting to cloud the real issues with smoke. Fact is, I have no idea how many Admins or moderators are being paid, but I'll venture out on a limb and suggest that none of the moderators are paid employees.

One further note regarding paid IT support. The position we would be discussing would actually run more along the lines of a webmaster or site creator. In case you're unfamiliar with how those people work, they don't get up, get dressed, and go into a building to go to work. The vast majority are independent contractors that work from home, never even meeting the person(s) they are working for. By doing that they can accept multiple contracts from various businesses and make a very handsome income while charging each business they work for far less than a full time employee would cost. At times the difference is from one fourth to even one tenth as much or even more depending on what is expected of them.

The bottom line is that I don't believe there is a major problem, or any problem at all, in finding volunteers to serve as moderators or even to volunteer as full blown Admins. I have been either an Admin or a Moderator on several different forums over the years, mostly on IT related forums. I'm a full blown Admin on one site right now with 3 other full blown Admins and never once has any of us done anything that irritated the others. I'm also aware of at least 2 other forums with multiple Admins and those forums seem to run flawlessly.

 

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I should have been clearer. No, I 'm not implying that the admins here are on salaries. I'm pretty sure that they are all unpaid volunteers.  They do pretty darn good job, but as the saying goes "you get what you paid for".  What I'm saying is that unlike a well-oiled-machine, without paid support and admin staff, this forum will experience glitches and sometimes fixes will take longer than one expects. After all, the admins have things other to do than constantly watch over the forum or spend long hours fixing bugs or problems.

If the IT departments in your experience were problem-free then you are very lucky.  Like I said, I support iSCSI storage arrays and I see all sorts of horror stories.  Granted, I only see the bad stuff (since nobody opens up service tickets if their stuff is working), but I still roll my eyes about the ineptitude of some of the IT people I deal with. Some don't even know where the equipment is in the data center!  The most common problem is lack if proper data backups. The storage array goes down with a multi-drive failure (a RAID set can only withstand certain number of drives dying) where it is not possible to bring the array back online (basically they have to replace the disks and reset the array), and they have no backups!  Or some partial backups months old!  So the entire company (or a large portion) is down.  Sometimes they can sent out the key disk drive to a data recover service, but that costs a lot of money and not guaranteed to clone the drive to get it back into the array and get the RAID back in degraded state.  I see this in companies as small as some attorneys office, and all the way up to large corporations where thousands of employees are affected by the outage.

 

My reply was to your post:

  On 8/21/2018 at 5:46 AM, smhardesty said:

Sorry to hear of your health issues. That being said, this is exactly the situation I pointed out in the past on a different thread. I've actually brought it to light a few times. You just CAN'T have one, single person in complete control of a forum of this size. Moderators need additional capabilities to begin with, then there needs to be a minimum of two, if not three or four, with full control of the forum.

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It seems to be giving advice without really knowing of how many Admins they have here. And if you think that they are having problems due to lack of admins, I thought that you might want to volunteer to get things moving faster.  That's all.

[MrObsessive]

OK, once again I'm trying to start a new thread in the Car Aftermarket section, and I'm getting the dang 404 Error.

If this message here posts, then there's a bug somewhere on the board where I can post comments in some sections and not others. Not sure what the problem is, but this is happening waaaaaaay too often for me.

EDIT: OK, I see this one took so what's the difficulty when I try to start a topic in another section??? This is getting woefully annoying!

Edited August 25, 2018 by MrObsessive

[Chuck Most]

I had a similar problem earlier in the Light Commercial Under Glass section. Fortunately the forum saved the text so I copied it to a Word document and it's ready to go for the next attempt.

[Nacho Z]

Testing here, seeing I just wasted a ton of time trying to update an older post of mine.

OK, would not post a pic.  Let's try it without a pic.

[Nacho Z]

 

[Nacho Z]

Both.

 

This is the edit.  I'm just typing to see if it has anything to do with the length of the text, as that is the only thing that I have changed.  Sorry for wasting anyone's time.  It is very frustrating to load text and pics only to get the dreaded Error 404, repeatedly.

Edited September 2, 2018 by Nacho Z
Adding longer text

[Dave Ambrose]

Have you tried clearing your browser cache?

[Nacho Z]

  On 9/2/2018 at 4:05 PM, Dave Ambrose said:

Have you tried clearing your browser cache?

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I'm not too computer savvy. I deleted browsing history and cookies. Funny thing is, I cannot load the forum after this happens. Even weirder is it happened on my Windows computer and my android phone!?!?  I had to wait about an hour before I could get back on the forum. 

After I made the posts in this forum, I went back to the "on the workbench" forum and tried to post text and one picture and got the 404 error. It should be noted that today is the first time I've had problems posting.

Thanks to anyone for any help provided!

[Belugawrx]

Test

 

seems to work fine

imgur pic thru Chrome //windows 10

Edited September 3, 2018 by Belugawrx
backchecking

[Chuck Most]

I have only noticed the problem when I try to post a new thread in the light trucks Under Glass section. I just posted in Under Glass and Drag Racing with no issues. 

[Nacho Z]

Yup, really weird. I was able to post everything today. I did get the 404 error on my first attempt, so I started a new reply to my build post. It took. I added one picture and it took. I edited again and that also posted.  So now I have posted my entire original post that refused to post yesterday. I have no idea what went wrong yesterday but it all appears to be remedied.