It Happens to the Best of Us

Well we’ve had an eventful 24 hours.  Yesterday evening one of our servers stopped responding to us here at Blipfoto.  Unfortunately, it was a little more complicated than a simple “turn it off and on again”, but fortunately we have access to our fantastic lead developer who worked into the late hours with us to get the site back working again. During that time we had to take the site completely offline, so for you it meant no access to Blipfoto.  It was necessary to do this, and in the end the interruption in service lasted just a few hours. It was a failure outside of our control, but still - we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
 
There was a small issue with some inconsistent data when we brought the system back online – caused directly by the outage. A few users will have noticed some odd numbers appearing for the views, stars and hearts on their journal entries. That’s been corrected now and all should be back to normal.
 
Obviously, while the site is down, it’s hard for us to let you know what’s happening! We used our Facebook and Twitter feeds to share what we were doing. We know not everyone regularly uses those channels, but it is the simplest way to keep you informed if the site is down. It’s worth knowing that you can do a twitter search without having an account in Twitter: just use a search engine to search for Twitter @blipfoto and you should see our account. Computers do go wrong from time to time – so we’ll continue to use our Facebook account and Twitter to let you know what is happening if we have anything else to fix.
 
It’s not a bad time to explain how we work through any issues or requests for help from you in the blip helpdesk.  Since we took over the site, we’ve had quite a few months working with a few of you on your queries.  What we’ve learnt in that time is that there are some ways you can help us to help you more easily. The most important thing we need is a good, rich description of the problem you’re having. What may seem obvious to you looking at your screen, can be hard to work out for us! So we thought it would be useful to give you an idea of some of the things that can help us to provide you with the answers more quickly:
 
·      What’s your user name?
·      What device are you using to access the site (phone, tablet, PC, Mac, etc.)?
·      What operating system are you using (Windows 10, iOS, etc.)?
·      Are you using a web browser (if so which one) or one of the apps (either Apple or Android)?
·      Does it relate to a particular post (in case which one – give us the date)?
·      Explain the problem you are having in as much detail as you can, please.
·      If you are getting error messages, what are they?
·      If at all possible, can you take a screenshot of the error and add it to the helpdesk ticket?

We’re going to put this up as an FAQ on help desk and we’ll change the hints on the request form to prompt you.

Thanks again for your patience yesterday,