new site = very difficult to work with!

[ViperGeorge]

I want to thank the webmaster and others that are working to return our club site to its previous glory. However, as someone that has spent my career in Technology leadership I would humbly suggest that major upgrades like this should have been thoroughly tested prior to implementation. There are reasons why we move new software to Quality Assurance environments and User Acceptance Testing environments prior to implementation. It allows us to verify that the change that we are about to make in fact operates as intended. It is not necessary to replicate the production environment fully, as this would be expensive, but installing the new software and testing it first makes a heck of a lot of sense. It should have been easy to identify that this change was going to have major impacts to the site. Naturally we also attempt to over-communicate on major changes to make sure that our customers/users are anticipating the change and what impacts it might have.

Even in the corporate world we occasionally run software that is no longer supported by the vendor or otherwise is out of date. This is not a reason to jump into an upgrade without thorough testing. The software worked yesterday and will most likely work today and tomorrow. (Rare exception is when a vendor builds in an expiration date based on license renewal.) When we make major changes to our web site we set up an alternate URL and allow a group of internal users to bang away at it to test it. We would not move it to production until we were reasonably confident of the outcome.

Again, I know that folks are working hard to fix the various problems and I'm not trying to be overly critical here. Life will go on and the VCA will survive this little hiccup with the website and I'm sure that future upgrades will be much more seamless.

 

[le66]

Hello from France,

I think I have some little problems to read the new form of the VCA forum, my computer is an old one but i's dammage not to follow the threads in time... (for example, I have some difficulties to read on my first thread 1/18 model cars... and the others...)



What can I do to follow you better??

Thanks by advance. Chris.

You must be registered for see images

 

[Vipuronr]

I've tried logging on daily and sometimes more than once a day and it does not hold my login info. While not major, its a real pain to always have to put this in especially when logging in on my cellphone. Did not happen with old site.

Just sayin'

 

[MoreBeer]

Even in the corporate world we occasionally run software that is no longer supported by the vendor or otherwise is out of date. This is not a reason to jump into an upgrade without thorough testing. The software worked yesterday and will most likely work today and tomorrow.

Not to completely hijack this thread, but I'm going to guess you treat active exploits against Internet-facing applications slightly differently...

http://tinyurl.com/3vj6naq

-mb

 

[ViperGeorge]

Virtually every software product out there has vulnerabilities and yes we take them seriously. However, it is still best practice to run a test of new software to ascertain whether the cure is worse than the disease. We would do that even for a major security threat. Let's face it we are talking about a car club's website not the World Bank. Even a security breach, bad as it might be, probably would not be catastrophic or irrecoverable (assuming of course that we follow other best practices such as regular backups). It is not like the security breach would like cause millions of dollars worth of damage. I have worked in the Financial industry all my life and a security fix could take down a bank's ATM or branch network, this would be worse than living with the risk until such time as the patch could be adequately proven. I've actually seen this happen to one of the four largest banks in the country. They installed a security patch which in turn took down their ATM and branch networks. They were too overzealous in wanting to immediately close a security hole. How much did that cost them? Security risk must always be balanced against the potential impacts, their likelihood, and the confidence in the patch.

I'm not trying to be overly critical of the folks that manage this site but there are IT best practices for a reason. Even today, many weeks after the upgrade, there are still gaps relative to where this site used to be. I applaud the tireless effort that some have put in just to get us back to where we are but it is possible that we might have avoided much of this pain in the first place. I know I will be criticized for posted this as people will say I'm just Monday morning quarterbacking but that's been part of my job for over 30 years.