Patience Is A Virtue…

At approximately 4:20am cst on Friday June July, 18th 2008, throughout the Plurkiverse, time stood still, as Plurk went down for an one hour maintenance. Little did everyone know when the hour was up, Plurk would not be! We the Pleeps only received a message that downtime was imminent, and taking longer than expected, yet would be back soon. This was an understatement of what was to come. Plurk was actually down a grueling thirteen hours, and at approximately 2:05pm cst the lights came back on. After plurking and responding to a couple of posts, I realized everything would be dim in the world of Plurk for hours to come.

While most of the time Plurk rolls out features “on the fly” with little or no downtime, it is generally expected that eventually they will have to take the service down for maintenance. This downtime is important because not only are new features being implemented for all Pleeps alike, but also they may be providing critical security updates to keep us protected. Now while I realize that people view Plurk as a dependable service, please be assured that there can and will be downtime with any technology out there. We should look on the brighter side of things, being that Plurk has nowhere near the downtime that other services in the same field possess.

Patience, who needs it?

Well if you read this post in its entirety, you do! All this bickering and complaining about downtime will not cut it people. The Plurk developers are hard at work to provide an outstanding service to the community, and happenings like I saw Friday and early Saturday need to cease. We are all in here for the common good of Plurk and we should act that way and treat the devs and each other with respect while here. We have a bunch of Pleeps complaining about downtime and errors, and on top of that getting angry about it. Don’t let it dictate your expectation of what Plurk will become, and definitely don’t leave, because Plurk is all about the community and YOU are part of that!

I feel that people may have over-reacted a bit when Plurk came back online. So karma went down a little, and so what if there were a few bugs in the system that needed worked out? Be Patient! Give them time and remember that this is just a small team of developers working in their spare time (no this is not the only work they do.) to keep a large audience happy. Dont forget that they not only need to maintain the site, code, and design of Plurk, but also converse with the Pleeps to get a better understanding of what we all want. Being a plurker myself I know how much of a daunting and time consuming task this can be.

What we really need to do is show some appreciation for the devs as they have worked hard for us, Let us all take a moment, and give a little back, by posting what you like most about Plurk in the comments below. Tell the devs what, of all their hard work, you appreciate, and let it be known what an outstanding job THEY do.

My Recommendations (Not Gripes!) To The Devs!

While downtime is an essential part of the service, there are a few things that you all can do to mutually keep the Pleeps happy. My recommendations to Plurk are:

• Put these downtimes on the blog as soon as you know they are scheduled. If people know about the downtime coming up they are a little less likely to be upset about it.

• Like the old saying goes, “If it can go wrong, It will”. If it does happen to take over the maintenance time, update the blog post to reflect this and if possible give an estimated time when it will be back up.

I realize that you, the devs, are busy, so if you cannot take these small tips into consideration I completely understand. That is why they are just suggestions!

Concluding A Weekend

Well following the Friday incident the developers have, according to their blog post, given everyone +1.00 karma across the board and have introduced 3 new qualifier verbs (something Pleeps have been asking for a while now). To me it seems as they did have some problems and are very apologetic about them. They are trying their hardest to get back in good graces, with the Pleeps, by giving us rewards. Now I, just as much as anyone, love new features, but we should always love the Plurk devs for everything they do, and no matter what lets show some Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, and most of all Kindness.

PLURK IS FOREVER STRONG, and I am thoughtwrong

Filed under: Pleeps