In this thread, Etsy admin RevolvingDork explains what happened:
Today at roughly 2:15pm EST, there was a failure on one of our load balancing machines that rendered the site inaccessible. We recognized the failure immediately, but were unable to restore full connectivity until 3:30pm EST.
Unfortunately, tracking down the issue required all of our servers to be reset, which in turn erased all view tally data from listings. It is unlikely that we will be able to retrieve this data to bring them back, but we will try.
We’re now investigating the causes of the issue, and tightening everything back up. Those that had a showcase scheduled for today will be refunded.
We apologize for any inconvenience this outage has caused, and we’re doing our best to ensure that it won’t happen again.
Posted at 3:40 pm, February 23 2008 EST
Edit:
RD has stated that all showcases for today will be refunded.
Edit (Feb. 27/08):
RD has started a new thread about the site outage and view reset.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Deja Vu, I find it typical of RD that he is not very specific about the effects of this incident, nor even seems to care or be knowledgable about the actual details.
Someone started a thread which noted that plenty of older items still had view counts, and all were not lost, but rather then actually address the problem, or say ANYTHING he locked that thread and linked to his post about it, saying ‘full info is here’. Which, to anyone with half a wit, was not clear since the entire point of the thread he locked was that full info was NOT ‘there’. But, he dones’t have time to be bothered with that, apparently.
I also noted a new user the same day with technical frustrations, getting their ‘exception occurred’ text error message when trying to make a listing. Strange, he had time to lock one of their two threds himself - pointing to another one - but not time to actually answer this technical question? No, he left that to Jim Chesters, as if he had any idea what he is talking about. of course, RD’s answers are rarely useful anyhow, so this person wasn’t missing out on much. This error that was being referred to is clearly a programming deficiency in the listing forms, but hell if RD would ever admit that. He’d just tell you to restart your browser and clear your cookies.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Yeah, dahliasoleil, I totally agree.
Half the poeple on the forums act like Etsy is doing us a huge favor (rather than running a for-profit corporation from which I’m sure some of them are doing quite well), and Etsy doesn’t seem to comprehend that many sellers are running businesses, trying to support families, themselves, pay bills, not have fun little gamey time with frown faces and orange haired fishes.
The endless ‘THANK YOU!’ anytime the tech staff do anything at all annoys me, too. Or like, say, when images can’t be uploaded for the eigth time due to some poor architecture and tech error, and then when they fix that, people get all excited to ‘thank’ them for doing their jobs, poorly?
I think it’s quite telling that some older items have views, like your, Deja Vu.
I guess they backed up the view data , oh, sometime last year. Probably they were too busy backing up the Gift Guide or working on their massive, 20 person day and night effort to restore ‘Alchemy’… it’s comparable to doigna moon landing, that Alchemy, um, apparently.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I am disturbed by RD’s assertion that “all view tally data” has been erased. This is absolutely not true - I have retained hundreds of views on each of my items, and so have other sellers.
How will people perceive this? Perhaps they will think that I have artificially bumped my view counts myself?
I’m also annoyed by the fact that this invalidates the hearts:views ratio on the Heart-o-Matic for any item listed before the outtage. I don’t put a lot stock in hearts, but I did find it interesting.
February 27th, 2008 at 3:08 am
Awww come on nigella, turn that frown upside down!
Just get out your pencil, paper, abacus, and manual typewriter and start compiling your new views into a fabulous useful success tool!
Of course Etsy doesn’t give you any idea where the views are coming from, or any easy way to import them into a spreadsheet, but there’s someone SELLING spreadsheets who is also writing Storque articles where they are…wait for it…promoting their own spreadsheets!
I think that’s the real success tip right there. Convince some gullible admin to let you write a Storque article which excuses their technical screw-ups and at the same time promotes your own items.
Maybe I should start selling abacuses.
February 27th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Uh, I can’t help comparing the sound business reasoning on this board and the cheering over lost views in the forum. The koolaid is passing around FAST. Or is there some cryptic message that I’m missing because I’m not cool and hip enough?