A typical day in the life of a site owner...

[Moleculo]

As I'm sure most are aware, running this site is not my regular, put-bread-on-the-table job. I do it for the love of the hobby, and any extra money earned from the advertising is a bonus (although most of that income gets dumped back into the site, before the family gets to it). That said, I thought this would be an interesting and amusing insight on what a typical day holds for run-of-the-mill requests related to running the site.

As some have noticed, animated avatars are not working on the new site. I knew they didn't work when we relaunched, but it wasn't the most important thing to address. Now that things have settled, I wanted to respond to some of the requests to enable animated avatars again. Here's a fairly typical sequence of events that I go through to respond to feature requests like this:

1. Search / google for documentation on how to enable animated avatars. Five minutes later, I have my answer: Oh darn, it's not a simple configuration or setting that I missed, it requires a special PHP extension to be installed on the host, then you can enable the software features that will make it work
2. Log on to host management panel, find the PHP configuration info to see what is installed. Nope, the PHP extension I need is not listed as activated.
3. Launch the admin app to browse the list of available PHP extensions. Oh look! There's a nifty "search" function so I don't have to sort through all 250 extensions. Darn, the search returned zero results. Now moving on to paging through all of the extensions to make sure it really isn't there....
4. I realize that the host does not allow SUDO installs of software; I have to submit a support request, so I log into my account and submit a support request to install the "imagick" PHP extension
5. Ten minutes later I get a response from support (fast response!) "Hi, the shared server run GD2, we do not run imagick in the shared environment." WTF???
6. I submit a response: "Xenforo requires imagick to support several graphics functions, including animated avatars for members. As a Xenforo hosting company, what is your plan to enable these functions if you don't/won't run the required PHP extension?" (Xenforo is the software we're using now)
7. 30 minutes later, I get a new response: "We will get back to you shortly." Well, at least the reply wasn't "eff off", lol
8. A little while later, I get another response: "Imagemagick is far more server intensive (blah blah blah...lots of qualifiers...you might experience degraded performance....several paragraphs...blah blah..) at 1:30am cst Friday morning that we can [upgrade your host] (sic).
9. My (paraphrased) response: "Xenforo uses both imagemagick and imagick," The one I need is the latter (per my original request) not the former, although I can use the latter for other things...really they both need to be installed. I give them the clarification because installing the former wasn't going to fix the issue; tell them to go ahead at that time on Friday to upgrade the site and also tell them that if there is performance degradation, I will just upgrade my service level because the support and reliability as actually been quite good.
10. I still haven't gotten to the point of actually enabling and testing the animated avatar function yet, so this step will have to wait until the weekend. Unless it extends past the dove hunting opener, in which case it will have to wait.

So over the course of about three+ hours, I've just been able to determine what is needed to support animated avatars and get the host to agree to install what I need, but still haven't enabled support or even tested it.

I going to pour myself a drink.

 

[DXman]

Here's one for you Moleculo..........

 

[bcrewcaptain]

Tim-you've done great work on the site, however I think Larry beat you with the bottle that never runs dry....

 

[543_Dallas]

and the glass that's never full.