newbreed

OK everyone, to put this thread to bed, I will attempt to explain what happened and what this thread was originally (in my opinion) started to address. This thread was based around some issues we had over this last weekend with our program. Let me state now it got out of hand and at some points out of context. It was really a few different things that seem to happen at once and it snowballed into one large issue.

OK, so a few days ago I had several affiliates ICQ me with links to our program (the nats side of it, not CCBill) with some urls that were throwing errors. Some of them I could see, and some I could not. I attempted to go through the code and find out (based on the text in the error pages) what went wrong. However, since most of nats is encoded, there was very little if anything I could find that would all the sudden quit working or go corrupt that I could even attempt to figure out and fix.

Some of the links I was sent were for the affiliate admin area, and we also were shown links that the join pages were down or that only the text entry form was up but the rest of the page was filled with errors.

Through this period I know some people were not having any problems, because joins were still coming in. I was getting the e-mails in pretty close to real-time, so I know affiliates were still making sales and this was either an intermittent issue or it was a browser issue with some affiliates (this will be addressed in more detail later).

I did notice in the error codes that mysql connection errors were also occuring. I have never had a mysql error like that so I decided to check with my host. Mysql was restarted and some of the errors (relating the the mysql server) were corrected and the system started to come back up.

Now all that was left as far as error codes on the pages were codes that related to nats files. I'm not saying it was a nats problem, it just appeared that way based on the text of the error codes/statements.

At this point I put in a ticket to TMM, and also tried to get John on ICQ for help in resolving the problem. No answer to my ticket for a few hours, so I decided to have my server looked into again to see if we were under attack again (we had 3 large attacks last week that lasted for 4 days). No other server or sql problem was found, but the last server tech I spoke with told me that the earlier issue involving the sql errors were due to my sql server locking up.

OK, so we are several hours into this now and my join pages are still messed up. I am trying to put out fires and explain to affiliates I am doing the best I can to get support on it. I am second guessing how long the problem has been occuring because I had had some other messages about pages looking corrupt, etc. since saturday morning. They all looked fine here for me though (again, this pointed to a browser issue for some affilates).

So during this whole period, one of my affiliates and I got to talking about program and software support options. Because this convo happened on the heels of the (my) program not functioning correctly for this affiliate, of course nats support options came up. I mentioned to the affiliate the new policy was to route all support issues through the ticket system, but that the ticket system was not as timely as I would have liked it to be weekends and some other times, and because we are talking about a SERIOUS issue with my program (join pages down), it kind of spawned from there.

Now, during this period of time, I am still getting messages from other affiliates worrying that they are losing traffic etc., so I started getting a little poopy with people. The only errors being thrown at this point were refernced on these pages as being involved with nats pages and directories. I naturally thought, as I did earlier, that something had gone amis with my nats install.

So, I have several hours of worried and pissed affiliates, and no reply to my support request, thereby not in a position to give an informed answer to anyone.

So at some point on Monday (time zones differ I know) the folks at nats got on the problem but were unable to recreate the errors. I as well as my affiliates were still seeing errors, but no one at nats could see them.

John suggested I clear the cache on my browser and try the urls again. On that note, let me go into detail on the url.... If you went to the first tour page and clicked on the "Join Me Now" link at the top of the page, I was sent to the join page that was full of errors. After I cleared my cache and cookies and tried it again, everything fell into place and all was well again.

Now, I don't know why I had a bad cookie, I got the link to the bad join page from an affiliate who has never had a problem with the link before. For that matter, it's the only one they use as far as I know on several blogs and forums. The affiliate was sent the link also by one of his own members. Whatever was in that cookie was what now appears to have been what was causing some browsers to see the erros and other to not see them. After everyone cleared there cache all the pages were back to normal again.

I still do not have a definitive answer as to what happened, the problem seemed to be there for some and not others and it came and went for others.

In closing, I think the basis of this thread was about support options, it just happened to spill over to (and be prefaced by) the problems we had been experiencing over the last few days, and it all got thrown into one big deal.

I spoke with baddog over icq for several hours about the link codes, error pages, and support, and specifically about TMM support. I felt it was not timely enough based on the problem I was having at the time, which was join pages not working. I don't know the exact time it took from ticket to resolution, I haven't logged in to look. The position I was in, and the point I am trying to make here now is it was a big deal at the time because we were in a position of losing business, traffic, and trust. We joked that this would be a good thread topic, and it really was a good thing to bring to light, although I would have prefered to leave the nats folks out of it.

Ultimately, in the end, I accept full responsibility for what has occured here. I honestly don't know what happened, but I feel like I should know. I rely on the people at nats and webair and anyone else involved with insuring our business remains running no matter what, and no matter the cost. I trust everone involved, and attempt to understand when something goes wrong that is beyond my control, it gets delegated to someone who knows what they are doing. If that person doesn't know, it gets moved to the next person or team.

We did the best we could under the circumstances, this just got heated and some of the stuff in this thread was taken out of context I think in relation to the original problems and conversations.

That's all I have for now, thanks for your patience, and thank you to any and all of our affiliates who were in any way affected by this weekends events.

Thank you Baddog for starting a good thread about a topic that should be discussed more often.

Thank you John and TMM for looking into whatever caused all this in the first place.

Thank you Webair for still letting me use the live support system....lol

PS - There is about 4 more pages I could go into, but my fingers are tired. I haven't typed this much since my first year in college.

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Loryn ‎(3:16 PM):
I love it, just as long as we keep the bedroom door closed from all ears then we can have throw down hard core sex that makes us money haha
fuck it we can have sex on money never did that before