RE: Are all RC forum's activity in decline?
[quote]ORIGINAL: topspin [quote]ORIGINAL: RCadmin Some great comments and opinions here. I didn't expect such a huge response but am thankful of the interest in this. It shows that there is certainly room for improvement in this space by the incumbent sites or a pesky startup of some kind. I just checked the June numbers as reported by compete.com and it shows another decline in unique
Posted on: 7/16/2012 12:09 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11157532

RE: Are all RC forum's activity in decline?
Some great comments and opinions here. I didn't expect such a huge response but am thankful of the interest in this. It shows that there is certainly room for improvement in this space by the incumbent sites or a pesky startup of some kind. I just checked the June numbers as reported by compete.com and it shows another decline in unique visitors year over year (this comparison takes out seasonal issues). Compete.com reports RCG showing 23.53% down and RCU a decline of 15.19% both year over year. I know many posted that it was just seasonal but must not have read the actual post of how the Compete.com numbers were reported. They are not in decline simply due to seasonal fluctuations but in decline when compared to Compete.com numbers the same month in the prior year. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rcgroups.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rcuniverse.com/
Posted on: 7/16/2012 9:48 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11157335

RE: Are all RC forum's activity in decline?
Was looking at RC Groups homepage just now. I remember when members here at RCU would say how many ads RCU had on the homepage. I just counted 5 ads on RCU homepage versus 12 on RC Groups homepage. Does anybody care that there are 5 ads on RCU homepage? Or that there are 12 ads on RC Groups homepage? Does anyone think people see this as ad overload or is this volume of ads ok? I have no real opinion on it but curious if members do and if it could be another factor turning people off to these sites? Sites need to make money to keep the lights on but wonder what the ideal balance of ads versus user experience is and if anyone has tipped the scales here
Posted on: 6/22/2012 12:56 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11127974

RE: Are all RC forum's activity in decline?
Perhaps it is not just one single reason but as many point out here the combination of all of them. Put it together and you get these 1/3 declines on RC Groups and RC Universe. Economy, alternate niche sites, fewer people entering hobby, kids playing social video games (zynga, ipad, ipod, etc), site stagnation from lack of innovation and other media (i.e. my older rcu partner started RC Pilot Magazine. A tablet based RC magazine). Whether one thing is mostly responsible for the declines or each just plays a small part that adds up to a bigger number. It will be interesting to see if things pick up in the next year or two or if the decline continues. I've always considered getting back into the game but would want to offer something a bit different and innovative. There are so many new website and mobile apps that have popped up in the last couple years that could be applied into this hobby space. Would be curious to hear if anybody ever said "I wish they had this/that for RC!". Or if there are any other ideas out there. I hate to see the excitement lost and lack of cool innovation in the RC space when it comes to sharing information or socializing between enthusiasts.
Posted on: 6/20/2012 6:56 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11124992

RE: Are all RC forum's activity in decline?
The summertime explanation is certainly not the case as my compares on compete.com are looking at last year same time so weather/season is a constant. Lots of good possible explanations so far. Certainly interested in hearing more if anyone else has some thoughts.
Posted on: 6/19/2012 7:52 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11124622

Are all RC forum's activity in decline?
Hi everyone. Marc here (the original founder of RC Universe). I've been sporadically keeping track of this site as well as RC Groups on traffic analysis site Compete.com. According to their numbers RCU has seen a 36.41% decline in unique visitors year over year. RC Groups has seen similar declines with a drop of 32.57% year over year. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rcgroups.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rcuniverse.com/ I figured if one site was losing traffic the other might be the beneficiary however it looks, based on these numbers, that this is clearly not the case. So my question is where are people spending their time online now? Has there been a migration over the years to social media (Facebook, Blogs, Niche RC websites)? Are there just fewer people active in the hobby so the pool of available visitors and posters has gone down? Is there another mega-site on the rise somewhere? I know my club uses Facebook quite a bit. After a weekend of flying the photos go up on the clubs facebook page and everyone views them there and comments as well. Has this taken the place of a good portion of the previous usage on the large rc websites? Would love to hear any opinions or facts on why we are seeing this trend in the last couple years.
Posted on: 6/19/2012 7:05 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11123617

RE: Minnflyer (AKA Mike Buzzeo) has unexpectedly passed away
I found out about this yesterday with great sadness. My condolences go out to his family and friends. Mike was one of the key people in helping me build and grow RC Universe. He was a generous, knowledgeable and talented individual. He always was there to help me or other members out anyway he could. He helped writing for rcu, helped moderate the site, helped answer members questions, created tutorials, wrote honest reviews and so much more. He even did the RCU Logo for me in Illustrator format along with a few other image assets on the sites. He was an amazing graphic artist. He helped me with some charitable projects I was working on too. This news came as a big surprise to me. I had spoken to Mike only about a month ago and we talked about the future. He wanted to know if I would be getting back into the rc world again in some way and that he wanted to let me know he would be fully onboard if I did. I was appreciative and flattered by his willingness and loyalty. Mike was a great guy and he will be missed by his family, his friends, coworkers, those he helped and myself. You are in my thoughts Mike. I'm going to miss you.
Posted on: 4/11/2012 7:39 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=11037475

RE: Ferrari enthusiast website
It is F1. ThunderbirdJunkie - Not using Joomla. Another hosted platform "Ning". Shoot me a PM and let me know where you think we can brush up and improve. I'm still working on header logo ideas.
Posted on: 2/9/2012 6:09 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Off Topic Forum - Cars, Trucks, Buggies and more"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10951107

RE: Ferrari enthusiast website
Yes it is. it's about 4 years old now but still amazing.
Posted on: 2/8/2012 4:03 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Off Topic Forum - Cars, Trucks, Buggies and more"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10950319

Ferrari enthusiast website
I just launched a website for those who are Ferrari enthusiasts. Doesn't matter if you are an admirer, former owner, current owner or want to be an owner someday. It is just about discussing and sharing info, photos, videos and more about all Ferrari cars. The site is free and also features self blogs and social network integration. It's free to use all features on the site. If you are passionate about Ferrari's then come visit the new community. Look forward to seeing you there and hearing feedback on the technology and platform. http://www.ferraritrack.com thanks marc
Posted on: 2/8/2012 3:35 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Off Topic Forum - Cars, Trucks, Buggies and more"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10950279

How to backup your hard drive and protect photos
I created a small and simple micro-site which is almost complete that shows you various ways to backup your hard drive safely. You need to backup to protect your irreplaceable photos, music and other important documents. Over 90% of people don't backup but as a former system admin for RCU and my other projects I became very involved in exploring and implementing bulletproof backup strategies. I realized I did all this work over the years on backup and everyone I talk to has never backed up their drives! Crazy and risky. Rather then get into it with each person I can just send them to the site and they can learn everything they need to know to get protected. http://www.harddrivesaver.com Hopefully if you are not backing up now or using some best practices this will help as a guide. Both offsite and local backups are necessary and easy/cheap to implement these days. Hope you enjoy it and find it helpful. I'll be continually updating it as new versions are released and I test them. Here is an excerpt from the About Me Page: A little bit about me. I have been developing properties on the internet since 1996. As a self taught programmer, database administrator and system administrator I gained a wide variety of skills over the years. One of the things that always kept me up at night was "what if the server blew up?" This is a nightmare scenario for a system admin. Then over the years my own office and personal computers became loaded with priceless photos of my family and pets. Also tax data, financial info, music and every other kind of digital document you can never replace if lost. This data is what I call "priceless" and thus a bulletproof system must be enforced to ensure you do everything to guard against hard drive failure or data loss of any kind. Struck with paranoia I went on a search and evaluation marathon for the best software tools and methods to accomplish this goal of zero data loss. Lose a hard drive? No problem. Restore from image quickly. House gets flooded or hit with lighning killing every hard disk in sight? No problem. Just restore from off-site backup. It almost is a hobby of mine now. On this site my goal is to help others sleep at night by explaining the steps and tools necessary to get a solid backkup and recovery plan in place. This way you can sleep at night and never worry about losing your priceless information/data to a hard disk crash or other disaster.
Posted on: 2/7/2012 12:35 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Off Topic Forum - Cars, Trucks, Buggies and more"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10948365

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
My best guess is those are gone forever as that was during the transition where files were not being copied correctly. question is were they ever there in the first place?
Posted on: 12/30/2010 9:42 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10227470

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
RealPilotAce, Yes Level 3 is a point of issue here we can see. It has been escalated but that is out of my control. 15M/3M would be useless for us. We need dedicated 100Mbps up and down. We push sustained over 10MBps at our low traffic. Based on your posts you know that you need well more then what you push. Considering we burst at times to 50Mbps the 15/3 would yield a site that would never load. RCU runs on 4 front end servers right now and two backend db servers plus a mail server. A 5th front end will be added soon. The site will not perform on just three high end front end web servers with the coldfusion and asp as they are resource hogs. For our high level of traffic we need at least 4 web servers and 5 is better. As far as Oracle...what is that 50 grand PER CPU? At that price even SQL Server Standard is a bargain. RCU is not big enough to justify a 4 cpu oracle implementation for 200 grand. We won't be adding to Larry Ellison's personal fortune anytime soon. :) I think the post timeout issue is a LB issue because users might be popping from one front end to another. I'll need to check how they are tagging sticky sessions. The above info was helpful posted by the users. Thanks everyone
Posted on: 12/30/2010 7:12 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10227163

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
Phoenixangel - your trace looks good. no problems there
Posted on: 12/29/2010 2:31 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225742

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
Yes. that is where they are and that is the same pattern I have seen within Level 3 Communication's network
Posted on: 12/29/2010 1:40 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225632

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
[quote]ORIGINAL: dubd Asking users to help determine the errors is still asking for us to QA the site. I suspect many people are experiencing the problem, but are not vocal about it. I've been "dealing" with them for the past couple of weeks and today is the first time I've mentioned it. I am having these problems on my home computer, work computer, iPhone, iPad, Droid, PC and Mac, so the issue is more widespread than you think. I was on the east coast last week and had the same issues. Doesn't matter if I am logged into the site or not. [/quote] We are aware of most of the issues and a large amount of post migration bugs have already been fixed. There are still issues outstanding which is why we are trying to determine the causes. Without users posting the traceroutes as they have above it would be a wild goose chase. Now we know alot of these issues are all network related. Basically anything north of 50ms is troublesome. You can see in some of these we have 100ms and even 200ms times. At that latency the site is unusable. The issue in fixing these is that often times the routers between you and us are not within our control.
Posted on: 12/29/2010 12:45 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225499

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
UStick - that helps alot. Those 200ms ping times in that traceroute basically show the network is the issue for you. Those times would make the site unusable. Will forward to engineers
Posted on: 12/29/2010 12:42 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225495

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
We are not asking users to QA the site. The issues already exist. We are asking that they help us determine the errors occur. QA people already are hired. Sorry to hear of your issues but your post does not help us determine why you may be having issues while 4000 posts per day and 50,000 users are not. As such we need to work with the very few who are having issues to see why and remedy these edge cases
Posted on: 12/29/2010 11:56 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225389

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
[quote]ORIGINAL: doxilia Marc, I see. I would have imagined that a site such as RCU would have had multiple servers in the US located at different "network geographical points" in order to balance traffic from different points on the globe. But maybe it's easier to have a single point of presence network wise. I appreciate your looking into this as it seems that users from around the world are having issues. Don is a few hundred miles south from the servers. I'm several thousand. People in Europe may be routing along the Eastern seabord much like I do and head west along the similar paths to mine. At the moment I can't upload [i]anything[/i] to RCU. I also can't navigate the site with Firefox. Chrome is working on the other hand. David. [/quote] David, With a bad traceroute like that I think this is network route related. It was passed off to the engineers to look at. Those ping times will cause browsing and upload issues for sure. As far as multi-geographical servers this was never done because of database consistency. If we had an east and west coast server farm we would have to have a master db somewhere. That would mean the other location would have latency from using a far away db server as its source or alternately an outdated slave server. With forums where you refresh and must see your post instantly this is not a good option. What is distributed are the images and other static site assets. These make their way to you through closer servers through the CDN (content distribution network). These will usually only be a few hops away with low latency.
Posted on: 12/29/2010 11:45 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225364

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
The routing to California is because the servers are physically located there. The 100ms range ping times around hop 15 are troublesome. I will bring that to the attention of the network engineers. That latency can cause issues
Posted on: 12/29/2010 10:50 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10225250

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
Ok guys. These detailed comments are much more helpful. There are two things that these issues could indicate 1) Network issues. If this is the case and many descriptions appear it could be then I would need to see your "traceroute" when these things occur. To do this you would open up the DOS prompt window and type "tracert www.rcuniverse.com" and let it run. Then copy the contents and post here. What I would be looking for is if there are issues with routing from you to our servers. 2) Server issues. The 500 error is definitely a server side issue and could be as simple as a memory leak requiring reboot. However to track this down since there are 4 front end webservers and soon to be five I need to know which one you are on. To determine this go to the Magazine setion, scroll to bottom and look for the server ID (RCU1, RCU2, RCU3, RCU4) and note it in your post. Last please post if you are on mac or windows and what browser along with versions for each. These problems are all fixable but we need to just determine the why so we can replicate, fix and test. thanks marc
Posted on: 12/29/2010 6:47 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10224776

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
Not sure I understand. You all posted here just fine. Rather then complain how about giving us some specifics of where things are breaking. You posted that you cannot post in a post. I cannot troubleshoot anything unless I know what the issue is that we are dealing with. We can fix issues that we are made aware of but with two posts every minute in the forums things seem to be moving along. The issues we saw were related to images and I'm trying to determine if those issues are resolved or if any other issues remain. Your cooperation is appreciated. thanks marc
Posted on: 12/28/2010 5:10 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10223764

RE: WHY IS RCU SCREWED UP?????????
As you know we moved servers and took a couple weeks to iron out some of the bugs (there were a few to get through). Please let me know if anything else is not working properly so we can be sure that all is back to normal. thanks for everyone's patience
Posted on: 12/28/2010 3:20 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Classic RC Pattern Flying"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10223557

RE: BUY & SELL NOT WORKING
Things should be better on the classifieds now. Please test and let us know
Posted on: 12/10/2010 12:21 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "The Clubhouse"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10188746

RE: What happened to the Scale Forum???
Site was moved to new servers and we have all techs on hand working through the many bugs right now. Hang tight
Posted on: 11/30/2010 6:35 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "RC Scale Aircraft"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10167181

RE: classifieds error
Yes. thanks for the notice alert...I fixed it after I saw that. needed to kick one of the servers which had a memory leak that got too big marc
Posted on: 9/30/2010 4:39 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Forum questions or problems"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=10038605

RE: RCUniverse problems
An email server got backed up
Posted on: 9/12/2010 10:44 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "MarketPlace questions or problem?"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=9996390

RE: RCU Videos
Yes we are aware and working to upgrade our package to allow more uploads. Might be a week or so. marc
Posted on: 9/3/2010 7:20 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Suggestions"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=9978936

RE: Member profile gallery attack page
this was fixed quickly. I just put the request in for google to rescan and remove the warning page
Posted on: 8/10/2010 11:07 AM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Forum questions or problems"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=9923636

RE: Another Trojan Horse
I removed the offending affiliate code. lmk if fixed now
Posted on: 7/26/2010 3:51 PM by Author "RCadmin" in the forum "Beginners"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=9889670