I've been contacted on numerous occasions by people who are trying to chat in one of the chat areas but keep getting kicked out, and they have no idea what's going on! I know how frustrating it can be....so I was determined to get to the bottom of this and some how find out why this was happening. It was especially annoying the night DeeDee was trying to give her brug talk.....and I hope she's going to reschedule it. Once she does, I'll try to take some notes from the chat and post some of the tips and suggestions she gives about the care and maintenance of brugs.....after all, who wouldn't love such a spectacular and wonderful smelling flower?

Last night, I got kicked out of chat for misbehaving!! It had never happened to me before. I'd heard other people tell me it had happened to them, so I knew that the system did this. Seeing it on my own screen was entirely different. I sat there thinking to myself that it sure is weird that the Assistant Administrator of this site got kicked out of chat for bad behavior. Some folks get mad when they see that....it's not that they are mad; it's more that they are frustrated. To me, it was so ridiculous that it was funny.

I wanted to tell you all that very often when chat starts to boot people out, or if you see a significant delay between the time you time something and the time it gets posted, Al is working behind the scenes on the site. I think that there are daily upgrades that must be made to the software to ensure that things run smoothly. When this happens, the whole site generally slows down to a crawl. Yesterday, he asked me if he thought it would be better to take the site off line or do a live update. I honestly wasn't sure. Then I came up with an idea. I don't know whether this is possible, but if it is, I'd like to have Al schedule the upgrades for the same time every day. I will post this on the calendar and post an announcement on the announcement board so that everyone will know that at a certain time every day, Al will be doing this upgrade for however long it takes. That way, we can schedule chat times around this and make sure that we're not trying to upload huge amounts of pictures or articles at this time. Hopefully, Al will be helping us by notifying us in advance, and we can help him by not overloading the system with data or images at that time. The other possibility is, should it be necessary to take the site off line to do this upgrade, is to schedule it for the same time every day, and as with the previous idea, post it on our calendar and in the announcements. That way everyone would know that at a certain time each day, the site would be off line for however long it takes to do the upgrade.

At any rate, I wanted to let people know that the problem with the chat area isn't that it has huge problems, but rather that we're just taxing the system too much when Al is working behind the scenes.

I hope this helps explain what's been going on.....and that we'll find a way to work out an amicable solution for all of us!