Fantasy Auctioneer CRASH (1 Viewer)

Discussion for the www.fantasyauctioneer.com site which crashed Tue 9/4 and again tonight Wed 9/5 the 2 biggest nights of the year for auctions.

I'm a long time (4 year) supporter of GP and FA but this has me so po'd right now it's going to be hard to convince me and my leaguemates to trust him again. He's had 3 1/2 years of history and all Aug/early Sep to get ready for this big finish.

George what happend?

im in one now also, having technical difficulties

The site is super slow. It's too bad because the auction software is actually pretty good.

this is a very bad year for them

We had our draft there tonight. Aside from one guy getting bumped out and having to reboot to get back in, it went smoothly. I guess I'm lucky. Of course, now I have to hope they correctly record/report the results to me.

Anyone stumble on any other online fast paced auction options?

I'm now faced with a 4th year keeper league that has no way to conduct our online auction before week1.

We might not even be able to find a time for everyone to agree on next week.

This is my fav league and I'm soooooooooooooooo pissed.

No problems whatsoever with my auction league.

Guess it's just hit and miss.

It's obviously too late for this year, but if anyone knows the owner (or they frequent here) - my company does load/stress/performance SQA testing and consulting. (HP/Mercury Loadrunner if anyone knows the platform). Have them PM me for info.

It would be interesting to see the stats from FA's auctions. Specifically, what percentage of their drafts take place in the final three days before kickoff. It's not to difficult to imagine there's a rush for limited server load and, possibly, limited bandwidth in those peak times. While the solution seems to be a simple one ... more servers, more bandwidth, etc ... that's not always possible, nor is it likely practical at the current subscriber rate levels. Sure, it's easy to say that supply should rise to meet demand, but when demand only lasts for a short period, your left with a great deal of nonprofitable overhead the rest of the time.

Don't get me wrong, either. If I had an auction crash, I'd be pissed, too; however, if you're waiting until the last minute to draft and don't have direct control of time allocation on the server ... buyer beware.

As for problems with the interface itself, I've been in charge of babysitting three leagues using FA for the past four years. It's a serious pain making sure everyone runs through the browser tests and is comfortable with the interface, but that's the cross we all bear. Still ... how freaking hard is it to run Firefox 2.0 and updated SunJava, especially when the site directs you step-by-step through the process?

It's been my experience that owners with interface problems are generally lazy owners. They tell some interesting tales, but the bottom line here is most, if not all of their problems are preventable on the user end. This isn't specific to any issues that have popped up in the past couple days with FA crash issues, but we seem to hear the same types of complaints each year, and it cracks me up how spoon-fed some people expect to be.

With any luck, there will be some competitive options in the next year to lessen the traffic burden and give us all a pleasant auction experience.

As a result of last night I have 2 discounted spots to now fill on very short notice. If you know of anyone please direct them to:

LOOKING FOR 2 REPLACEMENT OWNERS

Hello everyone,

George del Prado here, owner of FantasyAuctioneer. I'm sorry I haven't responded until now. If you can imagine, it has been one brutal week. Yes, our site crashed on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday. I've personally contacted all of the leagues that were scheduled to have auctions on those two days to apologize profusely (groveling for forgiveness is more like it - we understand better than anyone how horrible it really is to blow up a league's auction), to explain what happened, and to try to reschedule if possible (yes, it sucks to miss the first week of the season, but I'm hoping I can convince people that missing the first week is a lot better than missing the whole season). Not only are we handing out refunds, but we are also contributing cash on top of that to their league management fee and/or winner's pot. We're a pretty small company, so we couldn't offer a lot ($40), but I'm hoping they accept it as a small token of our apology. Luckily for us, most were pretty understanding, but of course there have been plenty of hate mail as well. Never fun to get those, but we deserve it, so what can we really do.

As for what happened, well, all the load tests we ran in June said that we could comfortably handle the number of auctions we had earlier this week. Obviously, our tests were flawed. We were able to handle the last several weeks, which included a very busy Labor Day weekend and the weekend before that, which was even busier. Unfortunately, we obviously could not handle the traffic from Tuesday and Wednesday. For those of you who were in affected auctions, I can only hope you can accept our sincerest apologies.

As painful as this week was, we certainly walked away with some valuable lessons. We have taken a major hit in terms of revenue (less refunds plus $40 a league add up quick) and of course, reputation, something we are doing our best to restore. Suffice it to say that we are going to be investing a lot of time and money to improve the site's stability, which will be coupled with being extremely conservative in terms of how many concurrent auctions we allow. I distinctly remember having a conversation with the firm that handles our technology about this. I said something to the effect of, "Are you sure? Maybe we should lower it just to be on the safe side." Unfortunately, I was told, "We're already being conservative." Had I pushed for it and lowered the limit like I first thought, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.

There's no way we can survive another meltdown like that, so I can only promise better days ahead.

Thank you.

-George

It sucks for all involved, but as an owner of a company like yours I'd be more concerned with the affect it will have on your reputation than the immidate loss of revenue.

In any case, good luck to all, and remember, there are worse things in life!