Good morning, constant readers! And you think The Darnold had a bad week?
Despite soaking the marks for around $352,000.00 per year in pledges – Free Republic crashed like a Piper Cherokee with a four-year-old at the controls.
And when I say “crashed”, I’m not talking about a server reboot – I’m talking four whole days.
And right in the middle of a Freepathon, too.
A pinned notice on what was left of the site directed jonesing Freeperati to the Free Republic Facebook page. OK – let’s go there.
At first, the posts are hopeful :
Coop Degrass Heck, this little glitch might actually create enough pent up craving among everybody Jonesing for FR that revenue might increase.
Then :
Robert Morrow It’s not about money! At $345k a year income the site takes in 50 times more than it needs to operate so giving more will not fix the problem. The problem is how the forum is hosted. Until that mindset changes there will be no improvements regardless of how generous people are.
Uh oh.
Bob Park The level of revenue isn’t the issue… it’s how its being used. Apparently, its not being used to do required/routine hardware upgrades/maintenance like it should. People are being paid salaries, but the proper procedures aren’t in place to deal with these situations… if they were, the thing would be back in operation day one. More money isn’t going to fix human caused problems.
Coop Degrass Robert Morrow said: But it IS broke; that’s the point or the site would not be down for 3-7 days two times within 7 months.
If it doesn’t affect the bottom line, then it’s a good business model.
Robert Morrow I guess you haven’t noticed the snails pace of the recent freepathons. It is affecting the bottom line and after this extremely long outage how likely do you think people will be to give more when the site goes down every time critical events happen when it’s needed the most. Your logic is not sound. I want to see FR do well and be profitable but to do so going forward it must do things differently even if that means less money in their pockets for a while.
David B. RobinsonWhat a sense of entitlement I see here. This is Jim Robinson’s creation and if you believe in the principles of Free Republic then we should respect the private property rights the ones who run the website to run it anyway they want and with the hardware and software they want to run it on. Donations is not a contract for services, they can spend the donation however they want and if you want to stop donating you have that right. If I was Jim and John Robinson (no relation to me) I could see them saying the hell with the ingrates and just shut down Free Republic for good. For all the big talk of people who can’t wait for CWII to kick liberal asses. You think the internet is going to be running? If you can’t handle three or four days of no Free Republic I hate to know how you will be in a crisis.
Coop Degrass Robert Morrow, Bob Park: So he spends the money on friends and family rather than equipment rental or purchases. It’s his money. And if the site slows down or crashes now and then, big deal! He’ll get it running again.
Which prompts the response:
Robert Morrow Are you drunk?
Heh.
Dick Mazza I’m guessing operators just lost interest.
Like FOX and other formerly conservative sites, FRs time has come and gone.
I will miss it.
David Petty Thinking the very same thing….will be closing my wallet to FR till some standards are met.
Coop Degrass Robert Morrow: If the current business model ain’t broke, why fix it?
Robert Morrow said: But it IS broke; that’s the point or the site would not be down for 3-7 days two times within 7 months.
One last snicker :
John Paolino Someone has got to stop putting the kitty litter next to the server. Damn cat peeing on the server is causing havoc. Not to mention electrocuted kitty.
The real irony here?
WordPress generated about one thousand script errors while I was trying to compose this post. I’m outta here.
There’s more Facebook Funnies, but I’ll wait until later in the week to post it.
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