WordPress Problems?

Several bloggers have complained about problems at WordPress today. The Humboldt Mirror noted, “[We are] peeved that the main WordPress site has been down all morning. Where is our beautiful Humbug avatar? Whisked away into the black hole of the Internets, that’s where.”

“We’ve probably amassed something like two hits in the past day–and can we see them? We cannot. How, pray tell, are we to measure our self-worth today??”

Other bloggers (like me) are noticing a marked decline in page views. This has nothing to do with the deteriorating quality of our work…. (And my self worth is not measured by such petty things, thank you very much!)

MendoCoastCurrent lost 8 new posts that went up today plus over 20 more that had gone up this last month. (This includes an intriguing story on a preliminary permit granted Finavera Renewables for a proposed Humboldt County Wave Energy Project. According to the article the company’s CEO said, “We believe the Humboldt County project could become the United States first commercial wave energy installation.”)

The posts still haven’t been recovered but, MendoCoast has hopes that an email she sent to the well known blogging site “may be able to bring [the posts] back up.” She is also trying to recover the lost posts through Google.

However, there has been no acknowledgment by WordPress, as far as I can tell, of any problems. If WordPress doesn’t shape up soon, they will find themselves targeted by the vicious teeth of those writers at The Humboldt Mirror who do not like to be deprived of access to their stats and, whew, those Humbugs bite.

UPDATE: MyStarbucks points out that while Yahoo News reported, “WordPress.com users were notified via e-mail about the DoS attack” in fact, many viewers (including MyStarbucks and me) did not receive any word from the company. MyStarbucks post was the first confirmation I could find of a problem. According to a wonderfully clear graphic on C/Net News, a DoS attack (Denial of Service) is overloading a server with requests so that it reacts to legitimate users incredibly slowly. I find it frustrating that WordPress has yet to address the problem on their homepage or by sending out notification to their bloggers.



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Rose
Guest
Rose
16 years ago

Funny, blogger was down a bit this morning also, as was Suddenlink all glitchy – sunspots? I didn’t know WordPress was down, too. Spent the whole day troubleshooting, and that’s no fun.

Rose
Guest
Rose
16 years ago

Funny, blogger was down a bit this morning also, as was Suddenlink all glitchy – sunspots? I didn’t know WordPress was down, too. Spent the whole day troubleshooting, and that’s no fun.

bluelaker4
Guest
bluelaker4
16 years ago

I didn’t notice this at our private family site, did you?

bluelaker4
Guest
bluelaker4
16 years ago

I didn’t notice this at our private family site, did you?

Staff
Member
16 years ago

Aunt Jackie, I didn’t notice this on our other blog but we are very small.

Rose, I had some pretty slow times just moving through the internet. At times, a site would take over 5 minutes to load. And my son noticed the same problem. Perhaps there were systematic wide issues.

mjean1
Guest
mjean1
16 years ago

I had problems with the other blog site. I lost a couple of posts before one finally showed and it took forever to log on. I just figured it was another of the many glitches I have had with my fancy “NEW” computer. I’m glad there is someone else to blame for this one.

mjean1
Guest
mjean1
16 years ago

I had problems with the other blog site. I lost a couple of posts before one finally showed and it took forever to log on. I just figured it was another of the many glitches I have had with my fancy “NEW” computer. I’m glad there is someone else to blame for this one.

Mark
Guest
16 years ago

Hi, first I apologise for the site not working as you expected. We tried to keep on top of the situation but the point came where we were forced to do what we did.
And I have to apologise for the story about the email. No-one got an email because we did not send one – it was an error in the story. With over 2.4 million blogs and more users than that sending out emails to all is going to be an immense task and at no time did we know when the attack would end. An email could have been worrying for some and reassuring for others so even if we had sent them it may not have been productive.
There was a sticky post in the forums and the Support page also indicated that we knew there was a problem and were working on it. But we could do a better job of communicating at times like this.

As I said, I’m sorry for the event and the misleading story. If you ever have similar concerns please email [email protected] and we will get back to you.

Mark
Guest
16 years ago

Hi, first I apologise for the site not working as you expected. We tried to keep on top of the situation but the point came where we were forced to do what we did.
And I have to apologise for the story about the email. No-one got an email because we did not send one – it was an error in the story. With over 2.4 million blogs and more users than that sending out emails to all is going to be an immense task and at no time did we know when the attack would end. An email could have been worrying for some and reassuring for others so even if we had sent them it may not have been productive.
There was a sticky post in the forums and the Support page also indicated that we knew there was a problem and were working on it. But we could do a better job of communicating at times like this.

As I said, I’m sorry for the event and the misleading story. If you ever have similar concerns please email [email protected] and we will get back to you.

timethief
Guest
16 years ago

There’s nothing more frustrating than discovering that all the time and energy you put into blogging a post was for nothing. Suppose you clicked the “save” or “publish” button and the post went sailing into cyberspace but was not captured in the database. It’s forever gone and now you must re-construct it. However, there are measures every blogger can take to protect and preserve the data they publish on their blogs.
Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers

HINT: If you had chosen to visit the wordpress.com forums and looked at the [sticky] posts at the head of the forum you would have found that wordpress.com has endured 2 major DoS attacks in less than 2 week’s time. Unfortunately, many bloggers chose to burden staff by flooding them with email, rather than going to the forum to read the [sticky posts]

timethief
Guest
16 years ago

There’s nothing more frustrating than discovering that all the time and energy you put into blogging a post was for nothing. Suppose you clicked the “save” or “publish” button and the post went sailing into cyberspace but was not captured in the database. It’s forever gone and now you must re-construct it. However, there are measures every blogger can take to protect and preserve the data they publish on their blogs.
Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers

HINT: If you had chosen to visit the wordpress.com forums and looked at the [sticky] posts at the head of the forum you would have found that wordpress.com has endured 2 major DoS attacks in less than 2 week’s time. Unfortunately, many bloggers chose to burden staff by flooding them with email, rather than going to the forum to read the [sticky posts]

drmike
Guest
16 years ago

Automattic has some very poor customer service practices and refuse to even respond to complaints. This isn’t the first time folks have been left in the dark. I gave up on them so much, I use Movable Type now.

drmike
Guest
16 years ago

Automattic has some very poor customer service practices and refuse to even respond to complaints. This isn’t the first time folks have been left in the dark. I gave up on them so much, I use Movable Type now.

Staff
Member
16 years ago

Interesting, I appreciate the input. I’m glad WordPress is concerned enough to have someone responding to posts like mine.

I just checked the forums and there is a small question in the sticky portion at the top of the forums that indicates in the comment section that WordPress is under DoS attack. To me, I would think headlines on the homepage would be the best place for information of that caliber but now I know where to look in the future.

Richard
Guest
16 years ago

@Kym

As I understand it, at one point they took the “wordpress.com” site offline to take some pressure off so that the blogs could stay up.

Barry said in: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=22547&replies=6

While we work to mitigate the situation, we have temporarily disabled the site [wordpress.com] so that it does not affect the availability of your blogs.

Richard
Guest
16 years ago

@Kym

As I understand it, at one point they took the “wordpress.com” site offline to take some pressure off so that the blogs could stay up.

Barry said in: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=22547&replies=6

While we work to mitigate the situation, we have temporarily disabled the site [wordpress.com] so that it does not affect the availability of your blogs.

Staff
Member
16 years ago

Richard,

You are right. I misread the piece (I thought the questioner was unable to access the dashboard–tsk tsk for not doing more than cursorily looking at the forum) and I never had difficulty accessing the WordPress.com site whenever I was looking so I didn’t understand that it was down at times.

I appreciate WordPress’s effort to keep our blogs up. This is in keeping with the quality of service I usually get here. However, I still think a banner at the Home or on the dashboard where they have posts from WordPress.com News would be appropriate.

Chris
Guest
16 years ago

You really got their attention! Good job…

Chris
Guest
16 years ago

You really got their attention! Good job…

Staff
Member
16 years ago

I’m still trying to guess how that happened! I think it’s because when you google WordPress problems my blog comes up second. But why it comes up second is anyone’s guess. Most recent?

Ernie
Guest
16 years ago

Kym, I sent you a horse laugh for getting stopped with no tail-light. I was laughing so hard it probably plugged up the E-waves. Sorry!

Ernie
Guest
16 years ago

Kym, I sent you a horse laugh for getting stopped with no tail-light. I was laughing so hard it probably plugged up the E-waves. Sorry!

Staff
Member
16 years ago

Hey, that’s not nice. I nearly Soil-ed my pants.

timethief
Guest
16 years ago

Using an off-line blog editor, rather than posting directly into the editor on any blogging platform provides advantages. You will always have a copy of every draft, in case it doesn’t reach the data center. If a published post is lost then – no problem. You have a copy. I recommend trying one. You’ll be surprised how easy they are to work with and to publish directly to your blog from. Offline Blog Editors Reviews

timethief
Guest
16 years ago

Using an off-line blog editor, rather than posting directly into the editor on any blogging platform provides advantages. You will always have a copy of every draft, in case it doesn’t reach the data center. If a published post is lost then – no problem. You have a copy. I recommend trying one. You’ll be surprised how easy they are to work with and to publish directly to your blog from. Offline Blog Editors Reviews

mjean1
Guest
mjean1
16 years ago

I just lost my post to your Moon Eclipse blog and it is too late and I’m too tired to try to retrieve it from my poor old brain.

mjean1
Guest
mjean1
16 years ago

I just lost my post to your Moon Eclipse blog and it is too late and I’m too tired to try to retrieve it from my poor old brain.

Staff
Member
16 years ago

Timethief, Thank you, I often draft offline in Word but I’m not happy with the resulting code mess. I’ll try this out this weekend.

Mom, I hope you got to see the moon. It was beautiful.

Lou FCD
Guest
16 years ago

Kym,

In addition to what TimeThief suggested, make sure you look out for yourself and your posts, back your blog up frequently. WordPress staff isn’t going to give you anything more than a placating lick and a promise.

I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything you read in the forums anymore either, they’ve chased off the experienced, helpful volunteers in favor of some pretty clueless people.

If you have a question or need some help, TimeThief and/or Dr. Mike are good people to ask, as is Adam at ArchGFX. Asking for help in the WP.com forums is at best going to get you a hopelessly wrong answer.

Lou FCD
Guest
16 years ago

Kym,

In addition to what TimeThief suggested, make sure you look out for yourself and your posts, back your blog up frequently. WordPress staff isn’t going to give you anything more than a placating lick and a promise.

I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything you read in the forums anymore either, they’ve chased off the experienced, helpful volunteers in favor of some pretty clueless people.

If you have a question or need some help, TimeThief and/or Dr. Mike are good people to ask, as is Adam at ArchGFX. Asking for help in the WP.com forums is at best going to get you a hopelessly wrong answer.

Lou FCD
Guest
Lou FCD
Guest
Staff
Member
16 years ago

Lou, I’ve seen your links on this before. I haven’t been around long enough to follow the story. I’ve been pretty happy at WordPress, although I was frustrated by the lack of information on this last problem. I’ll be paying attention to see how they handle other problems in the future.

And I’ll be backing up my posts somewhere else.

Lou FCD
Guest
16 years ago

Yeah, I guess the long and short of it is that WP is great blogging software. The staff’s just rather full of themselves, capricious, and not very concerned with anything but writing cool code and basking in their own glory.

Rather like very talented fourteen year old boys.

If they’d just spend an hour a week giving a damn about their customers’ non-coding needs, there probably wouldn’t be such an issue. I’d really like to see that. They’d take over the blogging-software universe, I think.

Lou FCD
Guest
16 years ago

Yeah, I guess the long and short of it is that WP is great blogging software. The staff’s just rather full of themselves, capricious, and not very concerned with anything but writing cool code and basking in their own glory.

Rather like very talented fourteen year old boys.

If they’d just spend an hour a week giving a damn about their customers’ non-coding needs, there probably wouldn’t be such an issue. I’d really like to see that. They’d take over the blogging-software universe, I think.

Staff
Member
16 years ago

I was over on blogspot til Max had me move here. (She’s very bossy) But once I made the move, I saw why she had insisted–the whole following the comments area is amazingly easy compared to Blogspot.

Lou FCD
Guest
16 years ago

WordPress is definitely several classes above Blogger, where we started as well. I checked out several different platforms before deciding on WP, and I couldn’t be happier with the software, no question. Further, it gets better every time I turn around. I wouldn’t want to use anything else.

At this point I suppose it’s unnecessary to reiterate my huge freakin’ caveat to that, so I’ll just skip it.

Lou FCD
Guest
16 years ago

WordPress is definitely several classes above Blogger, where we started as well. I checked out several different platforms before deciding on WP, and I couldn’t be happier with the software, no question. Further, it gets better every time I turn around. I wouldn’t want to use anything else.

At this point I suppose it’s unnecessary to reiterate my huge freakin’ caveat to that, so I’ll just skip it.

Staff
Member
16 years ago

I’ll consider it noted (and just possibly, maybe WordPress will note it, too.)