Infrastructure Improvements

** 9PM MST Update: We’re back up and faster than ever! **

During the past few days Spokt has been down a few times. This afternoon it was down for about 4 hours and last night it was down for about that long as well.

This is not acceptable to us! We have begun making improvements to our infrastructure to keep this from happening. We have a good idea what has been causing these outages and are working to replace that piece of our system.

We are so sorry! It gives us a pain in our chest when we see that Spokt is down. It is a symptom of growth that we hoped nobody would ever have to see. We think we’ll have them taken care of by the end of the day. Then we’ll announce the improvements we’ve already made to the books feature.

36 thoughts on “Infrastructure Improvements”

  1. Amy says:

    Thank you so much for giving us updates. We have a very large family that likes to communicate a lot especially when family members are sick and there are health dates to be checked up on. Over Christmas we started to generate interest again and getting all of our family members connected on this new site. There is some frustration on working out the kinks but thank you for keeping us up-to-date and look forward to everything coming back online soon

  2. Brian says:

    The fact that your site has been down is unacceptable. My family has been trying to share news of my very ill grandfather and due to your lack of ability to plan and run your site, we have struggled to find different ways to alert the family. And having such a large family has made this a task and put quite a toll on many people. Please get this problem fixed and offer something to the administrators of the sites for these issues.

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Brian, I’m so sorry to hear about your grandfather and I’m sorry that Spokt let you down this weekend. The improvements to our infrastructure were successful: Spokt is stable and faster than ever.

      I hope your grandfather’s health improves, may peace be with you and your family during this trying time.

    2. Sharon Nelson Nutt says:

      Oh PLEASE, Brian! You obviously do not know a thing about infrastructure.. you should be ashamed for your ridicule of this great team of people that has saved most of our old family information from our abandoned ancestry/myfamily sites. You have NO idea what it took to get thousands of websites transferred from ancestry.com to our new SPOKT sites. It was MONUMENTAL! If you knew anything about electronics, you would know that machines running on electricity are never going to be stable ALL the time. When you overload these servers with so much work and information, there is bound to be an instability or two now and then. I understand your situation with your grandfather – but what did your people do when there was NO SITE?? Think. It’ll come to you. I thank goodness for these SPOKT team members every day since I joined up in May 2014, and so should you. THANK YOU, DAN, for all your work (and of course the whole team) to get the infrastructure back up in very little time at all! We are happy that you update us on changes and I’m personally looking forward to new features coming! We LOVE the new BOOKS section! You’re all doing the right thing by keeping us informed. We never got that with ancestry/myfamily – ever. They never answered our support emails, and there was no phone number to call. At times they were down for a week or more. I get a little ‘hot’ when I see someone like Brian blame you all because the site was down for 4 hours! He has no idea what a goldmine this site is! THANKS, DAN & TEAM, FOR ALL YOU DO…

  3. We’re disappointed when you’re down, but it’s understandable– you’re having growing pains and who among us hasn’t experienced them? Hope your evening goes well, and we look forward to being back on track in the morning.

  4. Mike Monical says:

    Bummer about the outages.

    Just when I wanted to look up some info.

    Is it possible to maintain a local archive? Maybe a future capability?

    1. Dan says:

      Good Idea Mike! We’ll think on that!

  5. Mark Edmisten says:

    Thanks for the communication and explanation. It’s definitely understandable, and we are still riding high from the fact that you salvaged our decades worth of info and created such a functional site. Looking forward to future updates and enhancements!

  6. Seth says:

    Any ideas on when it will be up? i haven’t been able to log in for three straight days.

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Seth, we mentioned in the blog post that we expected to be back up by the end of the day and we were. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience!

  7. RonR says:

    As administrator for our site, the following message was emailed to our users:

    If you haven’t noticed, our family SPOKT Hub has been down (offline) much of yesterday and today. They are able to communicate with subscribers through their blog site and state it is a total outage, effecting all sites.

    Due to the demise of Myfamily and considering the massive number of MyFamily sites migrated, Spokt dove into a tremendous and expeditious challenge.

    Personally, this outage comes to no surprise for me. I also feel confident in SPOKT who will not only solve these growth problems, but continue with major modifications on their agenda.

    The way they respectfully communicate displays a lot of goodness and dependability to me… We should feel confident that our SPOKT site will continually get better.

  8. Lee Bennett says:

    I was very happy to see that we can now assign our older postings to Books, too! Thanks for that enhancement. Did you know that users of Google Chrome browsers do not see the Books the way they look in Internet Explorer? There is no book image when you click on Books in the sidebar, and the name of the Books are in such light type that they are nearly invisible. Fortunately, I also have IE and see how the books are supposed to look. Are you planning on making your improvements across all popular browsers, and to hand-held devices?

    1. Debra Lauren says:

      In reply to Books looking different on Google Chrome and Internet Explorer: I went on both of these browsers and books looks the “same”. I prefer Google and I can see book images and the names of the Books are not light at all. Perhaps this is an earlier issue or only an issue with some. I started using Books when it was first available and have not experienced any issues.

    2. Sharon Nelson Nutt says:

      I also have experienced no difference in the Books section between IE and Chrome browsers. I would suggest people make sure they have the newest version of Chrome to be sure they have all the upgrades. I have not tested this on my Samsung Note 4 yet, but it is also running on Chrome browser.

  9. Erika says:

    Sure hope that being able to upload multiple pics at a time is one of the improvements!! Unless I missed something…

    Thanks for your efforts!

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Erika, that is definitely on our list!

  10. Shane says:

    Keep up the good work. The books are a great addition. Is there any plans to be able to arrange the books alphabeticaly and also arrange the photos in the books by date taken or manually by the administrator.

  11. Lee says:

    Books definitely don’t look the same in Chrome as in IE, but I’ll check that I have the latest version. I prefer Chrome, but can’t work with Books very well on it as it now works.
    Also, why aren’t books in alphabetical order, so we can find them? They seem to be in order of the number of news and photos contained in them.

  12. Lee says:

    I do have the latest version of Chrome, and it clearly doesn’t show the same image of Books as IE does. Although I love what Spokt has done and continues to do, I’m surprised the site doesn’t work the same across browsers and platforms.

    1. RJ says:

      Hi Lee,

      We are looking into this, but it appears to be affecting only a couple of people so far. We have tested in all major browsers, and our testing showed our features were ready for release. We will of course continue to try to understand what is going wrong and implement any fixes if it is within our control.

      Thanks for your feedback!

      RJ

  13. Natalie says:

    I’m just trying to find my way thru the old KY Trees transition to Spokt and wish to say thank you for all your work.

    My question is about Mayflower connection. I am a member of the Mayflower Society and wondered about the rules & regulations regarding being on that site.

    1. Ken B says:

      Mayflower was simply our tool for migrating sites and data from MyFamily to Spokt before they shut down their servers. We don’t really have a Mayflower hub or site.

  14. Joey Pinkey says:

    Hello to Ken B ?I’ve just accessed Spokt.com regarding our Alumni site and happened to reach the bottom of the page. Did not realize ’til then that Spokt.com has finally been able to provide a feature that we’ve been complaining about; that being to add our own “message” to the “invite” part of our site. In dealing with you in the past Ken, am still asking if and when possible that we’re able to do the same for the “resend” part to our members that are “established” members? Right now, I don’t know how to go about reading what that current message reads? But if it’s like the current message that I just modified on the “invite” section, as one of the four administrators, I’d sure like to be able to change that section too !

  15. Joey Pinkey says:

    Hello to Ken B – A day or two ago, I followed your reply instructions regarding a “mass-email” to approximately 1800+ of your Alumni membership. I clicked the down-load icon and a certain page (42 pages 50 members each) and looked up and down the page to see where one can add a check mark by an individuals name, like on the old MyFamily.com allowed us to do, but did not see how that could be accomplished? Did I miss something? Sending a separate email to 1800+ alumi is out of the question, so we sure could use the help from the Spokt.com techs !
    PS-for a small company, you sure have bitten off quite a challenge ! As one of your clients, we’re with you and count on you to deliver what we need to provide a good site for our membership to enjoy. Good job !!!

  16. Kathy McNamara says:

    I have 3 hubs I have been using the book feature. The question is I have a lot of no images( many thousands) in the news associated with the books in two hubs:
    http://spokt.com/hubs/931991 and http://spokt.com/hubs/931980 . I would like to browse my computer and change out the bad image for what is supposed to be there. Now in photos I see we can replace photos that aren’t showing up. Are you going to fix news so we can get that replacement feature? There is so much history by way of replies I don’t want to lose that additional information. This was all due to spokt.com not being able to migrate the images of what I had in the news, history and review sections at the old myfamily sites.

    Please advise as soon as possible.

    Kathy

    1. Dan says:

      I’m glad that you can now replace your photos. Thanks for the input on news posts, I’ve passed what you said to the product team. Have a great day!

  17. Is there a way to “merge” some books or to add items to an existing book in bulk? I have a lot of books with “almost” the same name that should be merged together but going through over 400 entries seems tedious.

    1. Dan says:

      Yes Angelee, you can merge books. Click the “Edit” link on one of the books you wish to merge.

    2. Thanks Dan, at first I was confused but then I realized you take an existing book, click on the link, then it brings up the ability to edit. How cool!

    3. Yeah something isn’t working right. I prepared one of my books called Powers Obits by adding it to the book named Powers. Then I went to my book called Obituaries and merged Powers Obits into it as well as all the variations of Obit, Obits, etc. It said it worked but at first I had a duplicate post of the original obit I was looking at and after thinking I was merging all those books together … they still exist. So I spot checked a few from one of the merged books and it doesn’t list the main book I had merged them all into.

  18. Joe Shook says:

    Maybe I’m a bit thick now, since I’ve been up since a quarter of 4AM, but I usually arise almost that early each morning and I’m still not grasping where my family tree (or even MyFamily.com tree) information goes here and can also be viewed by other family members?

    Please advise?

    1. Katie says:

      We believe that Ancestry.com still has your family tree. We only transferred the MyFamily.com data, like news and photos.

  19. Working much better today and there appears to be merging of the books actually taking place and those books merged are (for the most part) getting removed.

    Another question I have is related to photos that were unable to be migrated. I have the original and would like to replace the big black box with the original photo. On the edit function, I’m unable to figure out a way to do that!

  20. Just wondering when we might anticipate some of the features from myfamily to be added to SPOKT, such as the calendar, recipes, etc. I don’t know how many of the features you think can be added. We enjoyed the feature photo on the home page, where we acknowledged someone with a birthday, or holidays, anniversaries, etc. Also enjoyed the “crawl” at the top of the myfamily page to catch peoples’ eye. Some family members have stopped accessing the new website after the transition, so I’m hoping we can attract them with some new features when they get added. Thanks for all your work. Elaine Rogers

    1. Katie says:

      We have migrated recipes over from MyFamily.com, and they are now in a Book called “Recipes”. We are working to release the Calendar as soon as we can! 🙂

  21. Katie says:

    Thanks for your input! I’ve passed it along to the Product Team, so they can look into it!

Leave a Reply to Joe Shook Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

We read every comment. We will reply when appropriate. Some comments are not shown right away and need to be approved first. We may remove any comment that contains content that is not family-freindly or is off-topic. If your comment would be more appropriate as a support request we ask that you contact support here: http://spokt.com/contact.