[negguaryParticipant]

 Is it just me, or has the sight been failing to load for other people as well. It seems like this has started sincd the tourney began last week. It will load some days and other days it won’t. So is it me, or do I need to be worried about my favorite sight? 

[OhCanada-Participant]

 I would like to hear an explanation on this as well. This always happens during the NCAA tournament and around draft day. So annoying. 

[r377Participant]

Yes.

Also the search feature in my mock draft hasn’t worked for the past couple of months.

I am worried the number or posts/users has halved in the past 2-3 years. Seems like only a couple of regular posters from years ago are still posting regularly

[Anton123Participant]

Aran Smith oughta either hire someone who can manage the site or sell it to someone like that. You look at draftexpress, they’ve just redesigned their site and they provide tonns of content. This site, on the other hand, looks like it’s just trying to drive all the users away: we couldn’t create our mocks until a month ago, the search doesn’t work, the site crashes all the time even though I’m pretty sure the traffic isn’t crazy, almost all the users have left.

Aran can seriously even start a kickstarter or something, if he’s so low on money.

[Robb_CParticipant]

Traffic on the site is actually up by a bit looking at the analytics.  I think majority of people on the site are viewing the forum as they visit the page, the average user is on the site for 2mins.. Internet forums are a dying breed anyhow mostly commentboxs are more utilized on sites these days allows user traffic to follow in multiple directions.

A more focused multimedia approach Podcasts, Youtube and more indepth analysis would put NBADraft.net over the edge..  More unique content equals more advertising opportunities. I think this site has the four legs to stand on with NBADraftexpress. They just have a little more skin in the game right now.

 

 

[CynthiaParticipant]

Typical performance around March Madness & the Draft, viewership goes way up. It is annoying though.

Anton makes a good point, if the issue is money then a Kickstarter wouldn’t be a bad idea. I think there are enough of us loyal fans of the site that would have no problem chipping in. Just think how much they would make from donations around draft time too, even from passer-byers.

[Clayton_Crowe]

We are in the process of changing servers so that the site “down time” is alleviated. It should also help with some of the spam on the forums that has become an issue lately.

The transfer has caused some of the outages for the site over the last week and we apologize for that. We are working on this as we speak to get everything resolved so hopefully this isn’t an issue moving forward.

[OhCanada-Participant]

 ” Thats sum bull”. 

Hate to point out the elephant in the room but you guys look pretty incompetent. Either for not telling us to expect a maintenance, or for deciding the best time to change servers would be during March Madness which should be the second busiest period on this site aside from draft weeks. 

Cant lie though its a good decision to get rid of that annoying spam. Had to be done sometime. 

 

 

 

 

 

[MartijnKeymaster]

Any appearance of incompetence is my fault. This was not a planned maintenance, but a difficult snap-move we were forced to make when traffic went up due to March Madness. We are fighting a lot of issues, including spam, and the fact that our traffic is a lot higher than most sites. Not only that, but the nature of the traffic makes it very difficult (and expensive) to run.

Unfortunately, although we do our best, the traffic spikes are such that they are difficult to simulate and test for, as that is a really expensive undertaking. Simply running the load test for a typical March Madness or Draft night costs several hundreds of US Dollars. This is just for the test itself. On top of that the cost for the servers to run the test on, and the cost of the team to prep and de-prep these tests. You are looking at a few weeks of work, and real money. During peak periods, we can easily reach millions of connections per hour, and this level of traffic comes on very quickly – in minutes.

The good thing (for us) is that the site no longer crashes, which is what it used to do a few years ago when we took over – we now reject traffic that the system cannot handle, meaning it is mostly available for most people.

I’m very happy to discuss technical details for those interested.

In any case, you are right: "That’s some bull" and all of the above are reasons at best, excuses at worst.
So, this is what we are doing about the situation:
– Aran has instructed us to upgrade the site. The team is currently working on modernizing the codebase that will give a better, faster, and more stable experience, and to build some cool new features.
– Modern, optimised code means we will be better able to handle high traffic
– We have deployed a lot more resources to handle load. This is the migration that was mentioned earlier, and should now be seen to make a difference. More resources are going to be brought online over the next few days.
– We have engaged with a top designer to provide a new look and feel that will also work well on mobile.

As I said, the responsibility for the problems are mine. Aran, Clay and the rest of the crew work incredibly hard to create top notch content, and it is up to me to make sure that content gets to you. I didn’t manage to do that this week, and for that I am really sorry. Please understand that we are working very hard to improve on this. I’m always open for questions (or scorn, whatever floats your boat)

[OhCanada-Participant]

 I mean explanation. Only problem is this has been said for years and nothing has changed at all. I hope your really working on upgrading the site this time around but seriously theres like threads with this statement. Would be great to see for us loyal users because there really is no forum like the nbadraft. net forum. Believe me Ive tried them all and they are garbage. 

[ProudGrandpaParticipant]

 and tli

[ProudGrandpaParticipant]

 and tli

[nick5354Participant]

 Man Draft Express’s new look site looks amazing. 

[HitsterParticipant]

 I posted on Draft Express forum for about 5 years before moving over to here, there used to be loads of posters on there but by 2010 it had dried up. I don’t think they even have a forum now, I haven’t looked at that site for a fair while to be honest.

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