Blimey, that was a long maintenance downtime this morning

Why the long maintenance this morning guys?

I know it was down for almost an hour, but that was from when I tried to log on.

Nearly went into cold turkey.

Yea I ran into that too, I was in the middle of my last article when all of a sudden nothing would save then reloading the page gave me the blue screen :) I watched two episodes of Smallville waiting for it to come back up... way too long to be down (even the "reader" side was down (public side)...

We apologize.

We had to do maintenance and it took longer than expected. We always try to do this when the traffic is at its lowest point, usually in the middle of the night in the US.

Sorry for your inconveniences.    

P. S.: Chaz - you did get a reply to your support email, didn't you?

I wasn't terribly bothered by it (although I was in the middle of an exciting session of building my second article (and screaming YESSSS every two seconds because I could do things hubpage authors only dreamed would become a feature someday) :)

What softened the blow really was how efficient your system is as saving the work on the fly. Had I lost my work, I'd of had to take a few days to chill, but nothing was lost, not even the last thing I was working on-

It took some getting used to that the save per module save the whole article + the mod. (vs having to hit "done editing" to be sure) On hp if they did maintenance you'd likely lose most of what you were recently working on, sometimes two to 3 steps back, even though they have an autosave feature....

I have a curious question Chefkeem, how many articles are published on this site to date, how many authors exist right now? and what's the highest article count for a single author?

I'm trying to gauge where the site stands right now (pure curiosity mainly)...

J-

We have over 2,900 registered members and about 6,800 quality articles. I don't know who has published the most articles, but you can browse our authors' lists and check individual profiles.

Wow thanks for the info, looks like a good start. The way you guys moderate is really going to be why your site will blow up in the serps (in time). Quality 100% is vital to compete with quality 75% or whatever it is (bigger sites have more bad content that isn't moderated other than filters that don't catch what Google does and human eyes).

I hope you don't move to a restrictive format like the other guys for the sake of automation- but rather hire more people to moderate and keep the content here 100% quality (I'd say at least 30% of HP and SQ is crap and nobody flagged it because they didn't stick around long enough to care lol).

IB moderates but only at first, which is ok, generally people do stay quality, but as an auditor for a content provider company, I've seen writers who start out brilliant (so we make them what we call "lead writers" a special pack who've proven themselves) and when left unchecked slack off.

I just did an audit today from one of our once great writers that was so bad I can't believe they had the audacity to submit it! No proof reading, no spell check, run on sentences, and the list goes on.

Moderating all articles (even if you let them go live until you can check them), is more becoming an asset, a card you can play against the bigger (for now) companies who don't moderate unless someone flags the content.

Fact is Google is looking at ALL content on a site, not just the good stuff and the bad stuff affects the entire site (this is why HP moved to a subdomain format (i.e. YourName.hubpages.com) on Google's advice to insulate the bad authors from the good and to assure good authors got a fair ranking (separation of country and state haha).

(Just look at EzineArticles.com, they moderate every article that passes through, nothing reaches "published" status without hitting human eyes first! Today they are the largest most respected article directory of internet marketers and search engines alike!)

You guys should think about doing that actually,(subdomaining accounts) as it's actually a good idea. Google treats sites and subdomains as separate url's to some degree and it allows a tighter control of bad authors so they can't affect good ones (i.e. before moderation of any given article, but also this is not just good for good/bad authors but well written/SEO/quality/useful content versus content that's ok, good enough for the site but that ranks lower for whatever reason than others- insulating good writers from great ones.

All articles of at least good quality give the site some power, but lower ranking articles (for whatever reason) affect the whole (as do the great articles, which isn't fair really to be brought down by others not so good- it's segregation for a purpose of SEO value overall, not to penalize those with less ranking articles but rather to reward those with extra attention to detail which takes longer, more research etc...).

If you don't agree with that path think on this- SPAMMERS, or people who create accounts and publish 20 articles that sit online before moderation can hurt all authors- granted this likely hasn't happened here yet but it can.

They don't go to this site and see that an article is written by joe blow and lisa reesa, they see an article on a big or growing "network" but with subdomained accounts i.e. JerricoUsher.Wizzley.com) they'd see all MY articles seperate (but also networked) from LisaReesa.Wizzley.com's articles but still see the root domain. If they told HP to do it there's likely a very good reason no?

Sure you lose some of the juice of the synergy but in reality, my earnings and ranking of pages there went up when they switched that over (it was a Panda 1.0 "work around" and it worked).My 60% drop after Panda 1.0 went to 120% after subdomains then settled back where it was (before Panda).

Nobody had to do a thing after the changeover it was a basic migration I believe (likely using a script to update content into account segments/states of the union).

Just my two pennies.

I'm working on a community post (wizzlies? article?) today, my first post written specifically for here (but applicable anywhere) fresh :)

Jerrico

p.s. sorry for the winded post, if anyone wants me to shut up just say so (politely haha).

chefkeem: 20. Mar 2012, 23:40

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We have over 2,900 registered members and about 6,800 quality articles. I don't know who has published the most articles, but you can browse our authors' lists and check individual profiles.

Rest assured that we stay on top of the going-ons in the industry.   

Yes thanks Chef - from Nightowl

I believe you 

chefkeem: 21. Mar 2012, 12:02

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Rest assured that we stay on top of the going-ons in the industry.