Since this isn't a widely publicized site outage and not very many people read the istock forums anymore, it's worth a note here before widespread panic ensues.

istock will be down today starting at 3:00 MST, just under 1 hour from the time of this posting. The outage should last a couple of hours.

Yeah, they did not do such a great job of letting buyers know that the site will be down for several hours. They hide the announcement in the Discussion Sticky and a post on Facebook, nothing on the home page or the new feed.

Thanks for the headsup.  I wouldn't have known otherwise. 

Scratching my head why they didn't do it yesterday when sales were down anyhow during the US Labor Day holiday.  Canadians weren't off work yesterday, were they? 

So work on Sundays and holidays - this isn't complicated

Since this isn't a widely publicized site outage and not very many people read the istock forums anymore, it's worth a note here before widespread panic ensues.

Wasn't it announced in a recent contributor newsletter?

Quote from: jsnover on September 04, 2012, 17:21

So work on Sundays and holidays - this isn't complicated

Don't be daft    That would cost overtime and would be unsustainable.

I don't know how it works in Canada, but in my experience most developers in the US work as "salaried" employees, rather than "hourly". They know there may be times when they have to work before or after normal working hours, including weekends and holidays. They do it when needed, and they aren't paid anything extra.

Great WE pay for the site being down again and it is Jay's fault

No surprise there, then. 

And this is why we don't do peak time site updates... From Twitter:

I need to purchase the hi-res photo to finish my ad! I don't even have the number on the ad because I can't search your page. Help!

guys I had no idea you were going to be down and I am in the middle of a design that is due in 45 minutes to newspaper.

How much longer do you think maintenance will take? I got some urgent jobs on! Thanks guys!

Does anyone know when @iStock will be up and running again? Kind of an awkward time.

How long is this maintenance meant to go for? I have a deadline

scheduled maintenance during business hours? Hope the site comes up quickly and that the maintenance doesn't break everything.

Help! I have an ad due in 30 minutes and need the hi-res image. I had no idea you were going to be down when logged in.

Please don't dawdle. We're on deadline.

etc...

I still think it's Jay's fault. This is what is happening when you bring pens on a computer based job, use a old keyboard and a bad chair. Nice vector tie tho...

So in next few days we will see few 8cent dls again.

Breathtakingly piss-poor design in that the text explanation of the issue, in several languages but in grey colour, cannot actually be read against the (same colour) background. Who are the amateurs that 'design' these things? Extraordinary.

There's a blue drip in Jay's nose:)

Quote from: gostwyck on September 04, 2012, 19:17

Breathtakingly piss-poor design in that the text explanation of the issue, in several languages but in grey colour, cannot actually be read against the (same colour) background. Who are the amateurs that 'design' these things? Extraordinary.

have we calibrated our monitor recently

Irrelevant. The same colour is the same colour, contrast-wise, however you calibrate the monitor.

Quote from: Reef on September 04, 2012, 19:22

Quote from: gostwyck on September 04, 2012, 19:17

Breathtakingly piss-poor design in that the text explanation of the issue, in several languages but in grey colour, cannot actually be read against the (same colour) background. Who are the amateurs that 'design' these things? Extraordinary.

have we calibrated our monitor recently

Irrelevant. The same colour is the same colour, contrast-wise, however you calibrate the monitor.

You need to check you browser settings or something because it is fine on my screen

Why does he need two red pens?

To note all the bugs on the site? 

Quote from: STILLFX on September 04, 2012, 20:31

Why does he need two red pens?

To note all the bugs on the site? 

 Lol, true.

Somebody needs to let Jay know his blue pen is leaking 

You need to check you browser settings or something because it is fine on my screen

Yup, you are probably right.  This is what I see (or don't see).

Quote from: cmannphoto on September 04, 2012, 20:28

You need to check you browser settings or something because it is fine on my screen

Yup, you are probably right.  This is what I see (or don't see).

Same 4 me ...

oh and Mr istock "emberMike" - just to let you know - it is peak time for half the world - the world does not revolve around western canada - it is Tuesday smack dab in the work day and deadline time so sorry, you screw your buyers in half the world  - which means I suppose that your buyers in Austral/asia are so few you can afford to alienate them by not considering their "peak time" - otherwise yes Sunday would make sense for downtime - which tells me secondly you are not growing in the part of the world that is doing best financially and is growing fastest. Ominous for istock.

How badly can you run this site I wonder? SS never ever has these issues.

Quote from: EmberMike on September 04, 2012, 15:07

Since this isn't a widely publicized site outage and not very many people read the istock forums anymore, it's worth a note here before widespread panic ensues.

istock will be down today starting at 3:00 MST, just under 1 hour from the time of this posting. The outage should last a couple of hours.

...couple of hours... seems like more 

It's been about 4 hours ... so far.

Even if they get it back up in less than 24 hours, how many days before it will actually be usable? Oh, I'm being too pessimistic, aren't I?

Oh great, they moved the bottom menu to the left now. What's gonna be next now, back to the top right again? 

I think I have never seen a web site where the cart icon is located on the bottom right. Who designed this cr@p?

Jay is gone.  Just a blank page now 

Maybe Jay broke it 

I see nothing.  Firefox, Google Crome, Explorer....  Nothing , nada...

Could someone please post a message in iStock forum and let them know some of us see nothing but a blank page?   

Thanks.

Could someone please post a message in iStock forum and let them know some of us see nothing but a blank page?   

Thanks.

I get this...

They said restart your browser and try again.

Quote from: traveler1116 on September 04, 2012, 23:11

They said restart your browser and try again.

I've done that.  three different computers and a tablet.... nada.

Yeah, me too, nada.

Quote from: STILLFX on September 04, 2012, 23:15

Quote from: Digital66 on September 04, 2012, 23:12

Quote from: traveler1116 on September 04, 2012, 23:11

They said restart your browser and try again.

I've done that.  three different computers and a tablet.... nada.

Yeah, me too, nada.

The site is back online, just that many servers won't have caught up yet. At the moment I can't get to it from an IP address in Thailand, but can access the site via a proxy server from an IP in the US.

Thanks, it's back up here

Crawling like treacle now, and lots of white/blank pages; though some persistent buyer managed a download. Took ages to upload an image; maybe they should suspend uploads until they get the buyer side and basic functionality sorted.

I found an apparently unreported bug (/feature?)

By default now, the prices are showing in � (for me). If I change to credits, I see the price in credits for that image, but if I do another search, by the main search box or 'find similar' (where the lightbox link used to be) it reverts back to � again. I'd find that annoying and unprofessional if I were a credit buyer. Using FF 15.0.PC.
I'm banned from iStock forums so if anyone else finds this is the same for them, could thy report it, please. (maybe on the New Way To Pay thread at the top of the discussion forum?)

If you have credits it doesn't revert back to �.

The site is back but upload is broken.

Gateway Timeout

The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.
Reference #1.8c327a5c.1346849746.5d8273c

Ah Jay Jay 

Still down. These people can't get anything right. Why did they do this mid-week? What IT department would ever do that? Are they f*cking idiots?

Idiots? Let's see ... what's that word again that means doing the same thing over and over again but hoping for a different result? Oh, yeah: Insanity! Idiots sounds nicer; let's go with that.

They will NEVER learn.

Still down. These people can't get anything right. Why did they do this mid-week? What IT department would ever do that? Are they f*cking idiots?

I'm staggered. I'd never have thought this might happen.

Obviously it is a better business decision to do this during regular local business hours - piss off customers around the globe - give them 10% off (the cost of which they share with contributors) - than it would be to pay salaries time and a half over a long weekend and to extend it for several days.

No, even worse. As I wrote yesterday, most likely they are salaried employees and so there is no such thing as overtime pay. It's part of the job description that there might be times when you have to work late hours and/or weekends.

Quote from: jsmithzz on September 05, 2012, 09:54

Still down. These people can't get anything right. Why did they do this mid-week? What IT department would ever do that? Are they f*cking idiots?

I'm staggered. I'd never have thought this might happen.

You left off the last word... AGAIN! 

Not that this is in ANY WAY surprising, but still very frustrating that the site is still unusable as of afternoon on the day AFTER the scheduled upgrade. 

According to twitter, they don't do these updates on weekends because they don't have enough staff to work on weekends. Sounds more like an issue of management not properly delegating staff to work the rare weekend when these updates need to happen.

Or if it's staff resisting management's requests to work on a weekend, maybe it's time to find some new staff that is willing to do what needs to be done. I'm sure there are plenty of talented IT folks looking for work in the Calgary area. Probably even more talented than the folks they already have, if the regular update debacles are any indication of what the current folks are or aren't capable of.

Quote from: ShadySue on September 05, 2012, 04:14

I found an apparently unreported bug (/feature?)

By default now, the prices are showing in � (for me). If I change to credits, I see the price in credits for that image, but if I do another search, by the main search box or 'find similar' (where the lightbox link used to be) it reverts back to � again. I'd find that annoying and unprofessional if I were a credit buyer.

If you have credits it doesn't revert back to �.

Fair enough!

I'm not surprised that IS keeps f*cking up their updates.

What I AM surprised about is that they are actually still in business after all that.

Does it not say everything that the marketing wallah calls himself KingCash?
http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=8098926
Might as well be up front about the only thing that makes them happy. 

Or maybe paying a wage for a regular hours job is cheaper than paying a salary for work all hours when needed, which could be 'unsustainable'.

^^Exactly.  Judging from the quality of IT they have, they must not be paying much. 

I picture the execs from Istock cruising the Home Depot parking lot in a pickup truck looking for vagrants to do IT work for minimum wage.  Or better yet, guys holding signs that say "Will program for food". 

I sold an extended license this morning (yea - will in part make up for the otherwise crappy week) but I noticed that they no longer say how many credits; just what option was purchased. I looked at a couple of older EL sales and likewise, they no longer say anything about how many credits.

So we've now lost yet another tracking mechanism for the details of our sales transactions - I assume it had something to do with the latest changes. So I have absolutely no way now to tell if there was any sort of error (like the missing 10% exclusive bonus way back when).

Clearly they aren't taking the many suggestions about needing detailed sales data to heart...

Today's post from Lobo:
"I could respond with the typical: We are working on it, but I don't have much more than that to share this morning. So it's almost worse, but, here I am now saying things are being worked on. If I had an ETA please appreciate I would share it.

Views seems to be bugged. We are getting some eyes on that so if you are thinking the entire world stopped looking at your images(generally speaking) you can rest assured that isn't the case.

The Zoom and the other features we disabled are slated to be brought back online as soon as possible. Clearly we don't want to have to disable anything a second time so we want to make sure things are sorted out.

Did we anticipate all these issues prior to the Launch? Of course not, but we have people working away as I type."

OK so again I have to ask - why did they not anticipate these issues? I'm not by any means an IT wallah, but aren't they supposed to check all these things inside out before launch?
Wouldn't you think that with a long history of this happening, they'd want to make really sure?
Weren't they always advertising, for months on end, for someone who could break their system. Did they really never find anyone who could do it?
How many other serious commercial sites have issues like this for days and weeks after they launch a new feature?
Isn't it weird that they announced their cash sales programme only a few days before launch? Was that the cleaner's suggestion of the week, then the programmers were whipped to get it done within so many hours, no matter what? APU.

As someone who shall remain nameless said, they should change their name to SNAFU-IZ-US. It's like the actual site workings had been running fairly smoothly for several months and someone thought, "We can't have that!"

And note that their promise that people who reached their target early would IMMEDIATELY get their higher percentage has fallen by the wayside. In response to people complaining about this, Lobo snarkily pointed out the Cash Sales launch, which OldLadybird also gave as the excuse for them not porting E+ (and being behind on many V/A transfers).

ROFL!  Good work!

@Artpuppy - thanks for a chuckle. I'd prefer a working site, but lampooning the idiots who keep breaking stuff is a reasonable second best

Tsk. Lobo says it isn't broken. Keep up at the back! 
@artpuppy: Very Good Indeed.

For those who don't follow iStock forums, the latest is that not only are they fleecing cash buyers who don't pay in $$$ (I can't find an easy way to change 'method of payment' for cash sales, though it [used to be?] easy enough to buy credits in US$, if your credit card rate was better than iStock's), but they are not sharing the booty with contributors.
When it was pointed out that contributors should be, according to the rate schedule, paid at their percentage of the actual selling, iStock posted:
"Royalties for our new standard pricing downloads are calculated using the same logic as credit downloads: we apply your royalty percentage to the net US dollar value of the file. We are going to change that language on the rate schedule to be more accurate."
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=347211&page=3#post6742383
So, not content with cutting the percentage rate of most of us, they are fleecing non-US buyers and not giving us our previously-promised share.
Nothing ever changes.
Worse, it looks like they've never been paying out the rate which was published on their site.
NB: I'd rather they weren't fleecing non-US buyers.

lisafx , jsnover , ShadySue - thanks for the feedback, I'll try to post more cartoons in the future. (I seem to be getting new material from istock with each month)

Regarding the site updates, I can think of only two situations:
One: the IT team at istock HQ doesn't have the skills to do website updates properly so we are just dealing with people who have the best intentions but just can't cut the mustard and no ability to plan whatsoever.
Two: Instructions are from Getty HQ to not work weekends or during off times and to do this during the work week. Sure sales will slump, but in the long run perhaps that is what they want to push us all to a 20% royalty rate. A setback here, a slump there, and soon we'll all be down a canister rate with lower RC earnings.

Hehe, iStock is truly a bottomless well of material for comic strips...

Makes me a bit sad though. I used to like iStock a few years ago. Now I get the feeling that they'll be out of business in a year or two...