Planned website and internal systems maintenance - Tuesday 14th of September 1.3

[#1]

This is just a heads up with regards to some maintenance in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. It's all in aid of some changes we're making in order to streamline some existing operational processes so I'm sure you'll get to hear about that in more detail when the time comes.
Here's a link to the details in full:
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1284389796.htm
Adam

[#2]

Glad there was a post I could follow up on...
Either this maintenance had not been completed by 05:15 (in which case, why not post something, please guys - CS people may be twiddling their thumbs if the work is also stopping their access, so someone could have posted) or it was completed but has a side effect locking at least one customer out (me - password reminder says the same as I was typing in, and to be frank, having set up a cookie yesterday to do auto login for the next 3 months, I'm assuming I don't have a cookie issue - though off to try another PC after posting this)...
However, as a general point, given this is a piece of major planned work, I wonder if this 9.5 hours of notice was the only announcement to affected users about the work.
In the past 7 years, from time to time, I have moaned that your announcements are far too close to the planned work - 30 years ago I was working in a support department dealing with a few tens of thousands of users (admittedly not the same as the several 100,000s of an ISP, but on reflection, even more reason when you have more users!) and we gave at least a week's notice. 
If it had been emergency work then give an announcement if possible but get on with things, but for planned work, give as much forward notice as possible, please!

[#3]

WebDude,

Quote

Glad there was a post I could follow up on...

You can post at any time, you don't need to wait for us.
Thanks for your feedback here. Unfortunately its rarely possible for us to give as much as a week's notice. Mainly the reason for that is that plans can often change so there's little point in us announcing things like this then having to change or rescind what's already been said.
In the cold light of day (or night in this case!) this was an outage of the portal site and an even shorter outage of our internal systems done at a time we can minimize on impact. If this type of maintenance would have had a more widespread impact or affected services like phone or connectivity a lot more notice would have been provided.

[#4]

"You can post at any time, you don't need to wait for us."
I thought that in Announcements, customers can only add follow-ups.  Happy to be corrected if that is wrong!
As for planned / announced ... I read your comments about not being able to give extra notice but since work like this needs a fair degree of planning, ensuring the right staff are available for a designated shift, and so on, I don't think it can really be described as 'ad hoc' work, esp if there's a slot of 3+ hours set aside and it wasn't a "there will be about 15 minutes when things are not working" type clause in the announcement...  Quite different to a situation where "your suppliers" have informed you (last minute) of some work they need to do, and they are vague about when during the "several hour" period your connections will be affected.
Was there an over-run, today, by the way ? 
I see I can now get to parts of the website without being prompted to login again, and I'm guessing that things were not back to normal until after 06:00 if not later...

[#5]

Webdude,
Of course, your more than welcome to reply to any unlocked post in announcements, I'm just suggesting that you can raise things like this in feedback and that you don't have to wait for us to announce something relevant.
I'm not trying to say what was done here was ad-hoc and you may see from previous announcements re planned maintenance we can't always give a lot of notice, this has been in planning for a while and sometimes project rollouts, like the one we did overnight are planned in fine details up until the day before.
I've not seen reports of the maintenance over running, as far as we're aware everything went to plan.

[#6]

having read the usertools  stuff 5 times im as wise as ever

[#7]

thisoldman,
Let me know if there's anything you want me to clarify about any of this.

[#8]

thank you for the offer adam.  To be honest , what has been bugging me lately is the obscure language you seem to use on occassions.

"we only use these processes when more impoactful changes need to be carried out"(a walker)
I like people who use simple english words and sentences.
Please remember im just  thisoldman

[#9]

Quote from: thisoldman

I like people who use simple english words and sentences. Please remember im just  thisoldman

I suppose it's a problem for people living north of the border where Scottish is the first language 

[#10]

Thanks thisoldman,
I've not had any other complaints but I'll keep that in mind, I'm a plain-speaking Yorkshireman so maybe I should try writing more in line with the way I speak.
That allretyt bi' you lot?

[#11]

ta  adam yer sik a bonny wee laddie  .... but nae mare  impacting words ok pal

[#12]

Nay problem pal, ah didn'y mean no harm.