Top 5 Website Questions So Far
First, on behalf of our entire staff and webmasters, thank you for your kind words and patience. We appreciate your comments and findings. They help us fix things faster.
Here are Your Top 5 Questions:
"Insufficient Storage"
When this error message came up, your website session went down. Why? That's what we asked. The site was set up to handle 3 times what we thought would be the biggest load. There just couldn't be that many people. Answer: There wasn't. What we found out was our site was being bombarded by indexing bots. TheQuiltShow.com has been around for 14 years, but the new site made it new to the entire internet. We expected Google, Bing, and Yahoo to start indexing, but suddenly there were 50 indexing bots all competing to look at every one of our pages. This doesn't greatly affect websites with 50 pages, but TQS has 30,000 pages. Suddenly the servers were bogged down and couldn't handle all the requests and you got "Insufficient Storage" error messages. Frustrating.
Our webmasters have blocked a lot of these bots so they won't overrun our site. Things will also settle down when we are no longer "new". Also, the entire website will speed up in the coming weeks. Cool.
"Media Format Not Supported"
A number of you had this message when you tried to watch a show in our WATCH section. This stumped us. No tester and none of our staff had seen this response when starting a show. But some of our viewers said this happened to them. They could see the Trailer and all of the LEARN videos. It was just the show. Then one of our viewers wrote in and said it happened to her until she realized it was because she had an "ad blocker" turned on. Once she turned it off, the show played. Also, some of the viewers noticed that they could click on the chapters and the show would play. We are testing based on this input and will get back to you. Until then PC people have said they can make it run right away if they view in Edge. Mac people, just click on a Chapter. Stay tuned...
"MY QUILTS Come Up as Blank Squares"
When you are signed in as a Star member, you can click on "MY QUILTS" to see your own quilts that you put up on the site. Well...you should be able to see them. Right now they just come up as greyish squares. If you click through you can see the quilt, but the MY QUILTS function is not showing the pictures. Our webmasters have been notified.
"Forum Posts in the Wrong Order"
Currently, the forum posts are in Chronological order- oldest post first. This allows any new person to see what started the post. However, most users of the forum are repeaters and already know what it's about and just want to see the latest post. The old forum was that way. Hmmmmm, we have to think this out BUT until then you can instantly reorder them to Newest First by clicking the "Latest Activity" tab at the top of a topic.
"PayPal cancelled my Membership"
This happened ONLY to our Monthly memberships. But in all honesty, it wasn't PayPal, it was TQS. We have changed our membership payment processor from PayPal to Stripe. This means that monthly members have to reapply for their membership so that Stripe will have the information. It's a one-time change and we apologize for the trouble. We will be sending emails to our monthly customers next week. Don't worry if your membership was about to expire, TQS has extended your membership to give you time to make the change and enter your information.
Bonus Question: Where are the Puzzles?
To find the puzzles, go to the search box at the top of the page and type "puzzle". Then choose the Blog tab. When you click on any puzzle it will have a tag at the bottom saying "Puzzle". You can click on that to see more.