Avatars - What's happening, Lefora?

Just noticed that a thread was started about avatars being offline for "a couple of hours"...

13+ hours later plus said thread locked I was just wondering why this is still an issue? Our avatars are not showing, and this has been an ongoing problem (on and off) for weeks now, with emphasis on the on and on and on and on part...

FFS!!! Is a solution on the way or shall we just bugger off and take our forum elsewhere...? Seriously.

We just seem to keep being fobbed off with excuses. Personally, I'd rather just have an explanation. We're having serious issues about once a week now, and that's aside from all the usual minor Lefora bugs.

Are things ever gonna get better, or is this basically the pinnacle of what my forum members can expect on Lefora...?

Yours very, very, very annoyed

Gethin

Hi Gethin, from the original service announcement: http://support.lefora.com/2009/11/03/service-announcement-avatars-may-not-load-properly/page1/

This was part of a change to our DNS to handle our growth with load balancing servers.  We're pretty transparent on any service interruptions, I even try to explain it in common terminology so admins are aware of what's happening.  Unfortunately, the way DNS works, it can take a few hours to propagate, we took off the announcement at the top of everybody's forum late last night when we believed 95% of forums were in the clear.  I believe you're in the UK and it may have taken a little longer for DNS servers in your country to fully propagate.  I would have to assume by now that the avatars are loading properly in your forum, please let me know if they are not.  For the fastest response, my email address is 'chief -at- lefora.com'

Again, our apologies for this interruption, but as we're constantly improving lefora, there may be brief service interruptions, just like there are on other websites, from twitter.com to gmail.com.  We try to keep them to a minimum, and this one, didn't have any downtime for your members, it just didn't have avatars loading for all  people (it worked for some members and not for others while the DNS change was propagating).

Hi Chief...

I appreciate that you guys are working hard on it, but I can't help but notice that it's once a week now on my forum that some part of the server goes down. Our avatars are still not showing even now (22:35 Tuesday 3rd Nov), and whilst that in and of itself is not a big deal it's just yet another thing that makes our forum look un-professional.

Surely if Lefora has grown so much that this is a recurring problem then something needs to be done to fix it permanently, no? To be honest, even if it's not going to be fixed right away I'd rather know, as I'm sure others would to. It would be a lot easier for me to tell my forum members that it'll be like this for the next few weeks rather than each time make myself look like a complete tit because I tell them you guys are on it and will sort it soon. I honestly can't remember how many times I've told my members it's been fixed (after reading Lefora Admin replies on here), and then it all goes mammary glands up again within a few days...

It's all very well talking about what negative effects only currently affect 5% of Lefora forums, but seeing as our UK forum seems to always be in the effected percentile, my explanations to our members are running pretty thin. And if you'll excuse my language, quite frankly they make me look like a dick.

This is precisely why my responses on here have become ever more fractious lately, because try as I might I feel I end up looking stupid because of things out of my control, and because I take at face value repeated promises that things will soon be fixed and all will be better...