Dear Mr. Turcic:
Greetings! It is around 3 AM in the morning, the place is dead, and I just saw your
MobileRead Week in Review post for this week, and it's as good a time as any to compose this letter.
The inspiration for this letter came from a recent announcement that you made about an upcoming server maintenance, where you said,
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
Yeah... It's that time of the year again where we're planning a quick maintenance window for our servers and software. The maintenance will be performed on Sunday, Jan 18th at 4:00am Eastern Time and I don't expect any downtime for longer than five minutes.
Cheers,
Alex
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There was something about this announcement which troubled me, albeit for a reason which I could not quite understand until after some persistent pondering on my part. After careful examination of my thoughts, I finally came to understand what it was that troubled me so. And it was that I do not see many announcements like this from you, that is, announcements of MR maintenance which would result in utter disruption of the use of these forums. I think the phrase "It's that time of year again" clues me in that this is an annual maintenance schedule. And this is a problem.
Mr. Turcic, you would be bestowing upon me--and I suspect upon a few other MR members as well--a wonderful benefit if you schedule more of these server maintenance periods. You see, if you do so, then there would at least be more periods of time wherein it would be absolutely impossible for me to access these forums, and thus regain some of the productive time that I used to own before I discovered MR. I think a daily maintenance schedule would be optimal. Besides increasing the rate of maintenance times, I would also highly recommend longer maintenance periods, say about 10 hours per day, which would at least give me the minimum time that I need to do the actual work that I am getting paid for. As it is, your 5-minute maintenance duration just doesn't cut it. And at 4 AM Eastern on January 18, I will not even be able to take advantage of this 5-minute down time because I am scheduled to then be about 30,000 feet up en route to some insignificant destination.
I put these forward for your consideration. Just think of all the wonderful improvements you will be able to make on these forums with such a maintenance schedule as I propose. I thank you for your good work and for the services these forums provide (for free) to eBook lovers everywhere. Despite my concerns, these are not lost on me.
Sincerely,
Seabound