Saturday, February 2, 2008

Version six delayed - 84% of voters with significant or extreme problems with Mediamax

There is a posting on the last blog entry here from John Hood of Mediamax, stating:

---quote begins
We've had a huge uptick in uploading recently which has taxed our resources. This situation will be alleviated with v6.
beta testing has been delayed until the UI is finished. we want to create a quality product and think that's more important than rushing something out which is what happened with v5. I think we can all agree that was an unfortunate decision as we've said before. Having said that, we should be releasing the api shortly.

Thanks for your patience.
---quote ends

I've missed updating the voting figures.

The response to the question "How do you rate the Mediamax service in December 2007?" was:

A: No problems : 4 votes (10.5%)

B: Rare problems : 6 votes (15.8%)
(within tolerable levels)

C: Significant problems : 10 votes (26.3%)
(difficult to tolerate)

D: Extreme problems : 18 votes (47.4%)
(causing severe difficulties)

There were just 39 votes in this round and I didn't manage to set things up for January voting.

It seems we are all a bit tired of the situation with Mediamax.

If anyone would like posting rights for this blog to keep people informed of experiences with version 6, please let me know.

16 comments:

Icy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Damn how much delay is there??
My uploads are not appearing now for 24 hours.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't mind so much a delay in processing if I could GET some more stuff actually uploaded to be processed. This past weekend has been horrendous again and quite honestly, and uptick in upload traffic MM should be able to handle, or in the very least be able to remedy reasonably quickly by adding more resources especially in the interest of keeping their customers who have stuck out so long with them while others have moved on.

And while I reserve the right to be sceptic if MM will manage to solve this in V6, fact of the matter is that we're not even beta testing so official V6 release may be quite some time in the future. And that's not even accounting for the 1 month conversion time.

Luzo, if you wouldn't mind I'd like posting rights.

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with you Will
Haven't seen it this bad for weeks.
By the way i checked the mm blog and the latest announcement was at 28th of january.
By the way my files of saturday evening are still not there, so delay time is almost 36 hours now.

I wonder if it is an infrastructure problem whether v6 will solve that.

John if you happen to drop by maybe you can explain why these delays occur and what can be expected to solve that?

Luzo I hope you can keep this running for some time.

Icy said...

Sorry, messed up above, I'd like posting rights for this blog as well if it's possible please.

Alternatively, I'd be happy to take over the maintainance of this blog if you're struggling to do so. Not wishing to tread on any toes, but keen to help out and push this blog on.

Have been struggling along with uploads too. MediaMax XL continues to crawl along, relatively reliably, but very very slowly.

I gave up with the web transfers because there's nothing worse than watching it fall over with an error inside the final minute of a several-hour-long upload knowing that nothing already uploaded will ever hit the account. A strange floaw methinks.

I would say that FTP uploading is effectively redundant. I manage such piddly amounts in a 24 hour period, with the constant need to disconnect and reconnect and close and restart the FTP Gateway tool, that it's just too frustrating.

In the halcyon days of v4 and even during the better times of v5, I have seen speeds of 376Kbs. Since the FTP Gateway, the best I've seen was 36Kbs, and the average more like half that.

:-(

Anonymous said...

jd- it was pretty bad over the weekend. I'm not aware of any uploads taking 24 hours, but there have been some that took several hours.
wtr/jd- we're working on it with our IT vendor in Chicago. It's taken some time to diagnose the issue. Initially, we thought it was an issue with our connection with our storage provider as I reported to you directly, wtr. That wasn't the case. We narrowed it down last night to a DB issue and hope to have it resolved shortly.

Anonymous said...

Advice please.

Some unknown contributors have uploaded 6 pdf's to my account. These files may have the same filenames as some of the files I lost in MM's big screw-up. I trashed and deleted all those unrecovered (lost) files weeks ago but I'm finding I can't download these latest pdf's that were only uploaded today. Is it possible theres still a conflict? Please don't tell me that any new files have to have different file names to the hundreds of files I lost.

Luzo Orbit said...

WillTRiker I am happy to give you posting rights. Please email me your email address.

icypurplepants, thanks for doing so. I have added you.

Anonymous said...

Beau, just out of curiosity could you send those pdfs to me (my account is WillTRiker)?

There could be various reasons that you can't download those pdfs. The worst case would be that these files belong to the category that can't really be re-uploaded to MM as the CRC value of the re-upload is the same as the one lost on MM. Basically if you do a re-upload MM will still link to the original lost file hence making it impossible to download it. The only way you can upload it in a way that people can actually download it is to alter the CRC value of it which means altering the pdf itself (or you can rar/zip it and upload that ofcourse).

It still baffles me, even after all those years that I have an MM account that everyones experience with uploading is so different. For me for instance I can't do anything BUT use single webupload while others are totally unable to use that.

I've been more succesfull in uploading the last couple of days allthough the connection/speed is still all over the place very often and I also experience several crashes during upload every day. John said that they have found the problem so I'm expecting things to improve relatively soon.
On that note .... it seems that processing today has taken a direct hit as I'm currently experiencing around a 5 hour processing time before files show up.

I'll be mentally preparing myself for V6 beta, which as I figured has been delayed and is now slated for mid february.

Luzo ... my email is Gem_hadar@hotmail.com

Anonymous said...

Hello Willtriker

Thanks for the offer but the trouble is I CAN'T download them. They were uploaded to my account (KUBOTABOOKS) by unknown contributors who, like myself, have been trying to compile a library of reference material. I can see them in 'My files' (they range from 180k to 6 meg) but I can't download them, view them, or send them to myself. I just keep getting an 'Internal error' message. I've tried changing their names and moving them to the Hosted section but that still doesn't help. Basically i have no idea whats in them.

I thought once the file recovery program was finished the clash with old names would be over. (MM!..Is it or Isn't it?). If its not over it will be almost impossible to advise contributers to change names or CRC values. Also, these file names are quite specific. They refer to particular product model numbers so changing names will just confuse everyone. And I didnt keep a list of the deleted old files so i dont even know which ones are going to clash in future.

What really annoys me is that MM have provided no reliable information about this whatsover. Even now, in their Help files, theres no mention of this problem at all. Whats wrong with these guys at MM? This is a major problem that many MM clients must be experiencing. How can they remain so damn silent about this?

WillTRiker said...

Hi Beau,

not much that can be done then. Iirc files that were lost during MMs accident, but that still are visible in your account and which have NOT come back with MMs restoration process can't be re-uploaded if you're using exact duplicates of the original files because the CRC of the file lost clashes with the file that's being re-uploaded. This is a database problem which won't be solved until MM switches over to V6 and they drop all their dead database links.

So either you have to somehow get into contact with your unknown uploaders and tell them to wait re-uploading until V6 is there or to zip / rar the files they are uploading. In the latter case the name except for the extension can remain the same as the CRC will be different due to the compression.

Anonymous said...

Willtriker.

But they were not 'visible in my account'. I deleted all unrecovered files weeks ago. The only visible files in my account are the 50 or so that MM didnt lose. So are you saying that new files will clash with old files that I dont even know the names of anywore?

WillTRiker said...

Hi Beau,

I'm afraid so. As I understand it, you might not have the files/links anymore, but V5 still has them somewhere in their database and believes the re-uploaded file to be identical to the one already in the database. In fact, it IS an identical file, but since the one on MM is corrupted the newly uploaded file will only create a link to the broken one on MM and not be a new entry in the database.

Anonymous said...

Hello Willtriker.

My paid account is just about expired. If I transfer everything to a free account with a new name it should solve any problems shouldnt it? Then anyone can upload to the new account and not have to worry about clashes. What do you think?

Its almost unbelievable that we have to discuss these problems in a blog. Theres absolutely nothing on MM's site that even mentions this problem! If I could find a hosting site that provides easy uploadong and sharing I'd be gone in a flash.

WillTRiker said...

As far as I can tell no. The problem isn't the name of the files but the CRC/MD5 value of the file and that isn't changed by giving it another name or transferring it to another account (paid or not). You're wrong btw, it IS somewhere on the Blog iirc, but it's an entry from some time ago.


Sorry no. The problemMy paid account is just about expired. If I transfer everything to a free account with a new name it should solve any problems shouldnt it? Then anyone can upload to the new account and not have to worry about clashes. What do you think?

Its almost unbelievable that we have to discuss these problems in a blog. Theres absolutely nothing on MM's site that even mentions this problem! If I could find a hosting site that provides easy uploadong and sharing I'd be gone in a flash.

Anonymous said...

Hello Willtriker

Yes I know the problem is mentioned somwehere ages ago on their blog. My point is that the problem and the fix should be permamently and clearly described in the Help or FAQ pages of their website. Its not like its just some minor temporary glitch. Its a major problem! Thanks for yoyr help anyway.