HC Blog

I’m happy to announce that Trista of Olive Branch Baby has agreed to join the HC support staff Trista will be helping out with personal relations and conflict resolution. So if you have any issues in those areas, you can email her at trista at hyenacart.com or contact her via the helpdesk.

So, you may wonder, what does Karen do now? I have a few things on my plate. I’m going to work on re-coding the calendar so stores can show up once a week, not once in a rolling three week period the way it is now. This will cut down on confusion about showing up on the calendar, and address the issue of dropping off of the current week’s calendar when previewing items for next week. This is a pretty big change, so I can’t promise it will be done for at least a week or two. After that, I understand there’s an issue with tags disappearing on listings. If anyone’s noticed a pattern as to when this happens, please drop me a line at karen at hyenacart.com. Finally, I’ll be adding the capability for sellers to delete lottery entrants and auctions bids from their listings. Again, timing on this is a bit out there, let’s shoot for the end of July.

Thanks everyone!

OK — so I think we’re starting to settle in to this server. Java image uploading should be working for both HC Standard and HC Multi now. There was also an issue with banners not uploading properly in BannerManage, but that should be fixed now. There may be something not quite right about purchasing advertising time via Paypal. I think I’ve fixed it, but if you pay and the payment doesn’t go through, please submit a support ticket to support at hyenacart.com. In fact, you can go ahead and start submitting tickets about anything that’s not working right.

Thanks for your patience as we’ve worked through this whole thing. Hopefully you won’t mind if tech support slows down a bit this weekend. As much as I love it, I need to take a bit of a break from HC!

This was mostly posted on the Yahoo group, but I’ve updated some information:

Welcome to your new server! It’s bigger, better and faster than our old one. I’m hoping we all see an even great performance increase than we saw last time we upgraded (less than a year ago!)

First of all, I want to apologize again for the downtime. I don’t think the previous host will ever figure out exactly what’s wrong with it. I’m able to access it now, but it still throws out a lot of errors.

Second, I have a laundry list of items I wanted to go over:

1) The site is currently at about 80% capability. I’m still working through getting everything configured and working on the new server.

• the calendar isn’t working yet, but I’m hoping to get it worked out soon *update: this should be working now*

• likewise, paid date updating may not work correctly yet because of the same issue *update: this should be working now*

• image uploading doesn’t seem to be working yet *update: the older i mage uploader is working. The java one isn’t yet, but will be soon, hopefully*

• there’s probably quite a bit more that I don’t know about yet. You might want to hold off on submitting help tickets for a few more days.

  2) There was some data lost in the move. The databases were backing up every evening. However, as the server crashed, it became unable to create the backup files. I took the most recently created backup files I could find to restore the site on the new server. Please understand – it is impossible to make database backups every minute of the day, so when something like this happens, some data will inevitably be lost. I am now able to access the very latest database info so if you lost a lot of listings or info, please submit a support ticket to karen at hyenacart.com for a database restore. Remember though, that this will set you back to last Friday, and anything that’s happened in the database since yesterday will be lost instead.

  I realize this isn’t ideal, and that items are being re-sold, order info has been lost, etc. This is pretty painful for all of us. If you feel that you need some compensation for time and effort lost, please open a ticket at karen at hyenacart.com and we’ll see what we can do to work it out.

  In the meantime, check your store for items that sold Friday and may be showing available again and take them out of stock. Please email customers who’ve purchased sold items and let them know the situation. They can contact me if they have questions.

  It’s not practical for me to go back and restore all the latest databases at this point. It takes several hours to do this, and in the meantime, changes are being made on the currently available database that would be lost at the restore. Our best bet is to keep moving on at this point (although, like I said, I can restore parts of the database on an ad hoc basis as requested). Unfortunately, in a site as dynamic as this, there just isn’t a way to make a perfectly clean transition.

  3) THANK YOU for your supportive words and emails. This is an amazing community and all of your encouragement has really helped me get through this. So thank you for your understand and patience. I really, really appreciate it!

  4) Don’t panic if you still can’t access the site. It takes up to 72 hours for the new server information to be communicated across the whole internet. Everything should be accessible in another day at most.

  Thanks,

  Karen

As I mentioned, I will be shutting down some of HC functions to keep the site running somewhat well. That includes the calendar, possibly the users on-line numbers, and maybe even the entire left-hand navigation for the calendar pages (including, ‘where are the hyenas’, etc.) If you could, please hold all your technically related questions until I send an ‘All clear’ message indicating that I think everything should be running normally. Thanks again for your patience!

Hi everyone,

The HC server is not happy. I think I’m close to isolating the problem. The main database that tracks most of the traffic, etc. for the site seems to be getting overloaded. To fix the problem, I’m going to have to split that database’s duties among several other databases. Unfortunately, to do that is a sizeable chunk of work and we have a pretty full weekend planned family-wise. I’m going to do my best to get this done tonight, but we’ll have to see. In the meantime, the forums seem to be working okay, but many of the pages on the main site are running very slowly. Also, the calendar is not showing all the stores correctly. I may temporarily shut off some functions of the site so it’s not so frustratingly slow to load. Thanks for your patience everyone!

I’ve just set up a new space on HC called Spots’ Corner. It’s a place to buy and sell used hyena fluff as well as other well-loved kids’ items. Come check it out: Spots’ Corner and tell all your hyena friends! There’s a $5/month charge to be able to list as many items as you like (much like individual HC stores), but to get the ball rolling, I’ve given everyone free listing time until June 30. So come on and list all the fluff you’ve been meaning to clear out.

Also, just FYI, there has never been a policy at HC against selling used items in your stores. However, just so you know, customers do tend to get turned off by it.

Thanks everyone!