Whitetail Exchange Problems 1-18-12

Whitetail Exchange Problems 1-18-12



First let me start out by apologizing for what happened tonight. I know that there are a lot of people out there that are mad at us. I know that there are a lot of people out there that are disappointed in us. I will tell you that it is next to impossible to For anyone to be any more upset and disappointed right now than I am. I have poured by blood sweat and tears into this company for three plus years. It is my pride and joy. Tonight I am embarrassed and very disappointed.



At the point that we were so flooded with users on the site and the site slowed to a crawl, Richard and I were trying everything and anything to get it going. That is where some of you saw the site go into maintenance mode. That worked a little bit, but as soon as we took it out, the load went right back up. At that point, I had to make a decision.



I had to decide what was the fairest thing to everyone. What was fairest to the great people that gave such great consignments. What was fair to the people that bid so much money and to the people that were getting ready to bid more? I had to make a decision. Like me, love me or hate me, but the decision I made was to suspend all of the auctions that had not ended yet. To me, that was the fairest thing to do for everyone. I just couldn’t let them end with the system not working correctly.



We are about 95% sure that we know why this is happening now. Many of you have seen how our auction sniping software works. When someone bids with less than 5 minutes to go, it extends the auction out 5 minutes. This is the culprit. At this point, I just don’t see how we can continue to offer that feature. I would like to get everyones input and thoughts on eliminating that feature.



Here is what I was thinking and once again I would like everyones opinion. I would like to work 24/7 until next week to get everything reset and try this over on the 25th. I understand if a consignor would like to pull out and I really don’t blame them. This is why I stopped the auction so the bids would be preserved and not lost. We will have to run it without the sniping feature and will more than likely never have that feature again.



I will also be personally calling anyone that got a successful purchase email for the auctions that ended at 9:00, 9:15 and 9:30 and explaining that we have to resell those items if the consignor so chooses.



I am not a big one on promises and guarantees. But I am going to put one out there for everyone. I promise that we WILL get this fixed. We will do whatever it takes to get this going RIGHT or not do it at all. Too many people have trusted us with too many great consignments over the years to do things half way. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes, I am willing to do it to get this straightened out.



Once again, I would like to apologize. I am embarrassed, I am humiliated and I am very sorry.



Todd Morgan

Once again, I would like to apologize to everyone for last nights auction. I really appreciate all the responses to this post as well as the many emails showing support. I guess what this all comes down to is that we need to get better and smarter. We have identified one or two problems that we can fix. You may see periods that the web site is down over the next couple of days while we address those concerns.



We are pulling out all the stops for next week. We will spend the time and money necessary to attempt to get things right for the 25th.



We do believe at this time that we are going to be able to save the Sniping feature. Not 100%, but about 90%. I think this is a very key feature to the site and we will do everything within our powers to save it.



I guess what happened here is kind of like our folks used to say to us “You’ve outgrown your britches” Last night, 30 minutes before the auction even started, we broke our record for the most logged in users on the site at one time. We had 195 users logged in. Through our stats we have determined that 1 in 5 people are logged in on the site. This means that nearly 1000 people were there and the software just didn’t handle it. We already have everything in place to update the software on the site that should handle the traffic. This is where you might see some outages on the site over the next 4-5 days.

$15000 on a test auction where we encourage rapid bidding, are you nuts? You wont be able touch anything in that auction for $15000