To those unhappy with Logos communication during outage
Having been on the inside of several critical failures, I'd like to give another perspective. For those working on the problem there is nothing as annoying as someone from management interrupting every 10 minutes to learn your current status. As you are identifying a problem anything breaking concentration slows down identifying the problem. So please, until the problem is identified, don't expect more than an hourly "we don't know."
Once the problem is identified and the solution determined, take the first estimate of time until things return to normal that is given by the techies and double it ... in the pressure something is bound to go wrong. The one I remember best is a 4th of July drunk driver taking out a power pole. We'd been discussing adding backup power.
If things are going wrong in off-hours or weekends-holidays, don't expect the techies to have the company's understanding of time zones or remember what form of communications the users may try. Techies tend to be extremely competent in their area of expertize ... and highly upwardly mobile if they can place that in a broader context.
And when they finally identify the problem, have implemented a solution and are willing to give you estimates as to what functions will be available when, half the users are going to read the notice and say "I don't understand what you're saying" while the other half are saying "but are you using xxx or yyy did you consider zzz so it won't happen again." Know which half you fall within, laugh a bit at yourself and give the people working for at least 28 hours on this a break. Monday morning is just fine for the post mortem and future planning - and by then they should be capable of broaden their perspective a bit. It has been highly focused for many many hours.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
Comments
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My, we are a demanding customer base, aren't we?
"In all cases, the Church is to be judged by the Scripture, not the Scripture by the Church," John Wesley0 -
No worse than Payroll or Hospitals.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Not asking for a report just 'we are aware of a problem and dealing with it' this did not happen on Twitter for hours. Also a status page should not be considered an innovation.
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I have never visited the inner sanctum of Logos (or the Outer Sanctum for that matter). I imagine it is a lot like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Seems like, Logos being all big and professional and all could send a friendly Oompah Loompah up the elevator to assure the outside world that smoke belching from the chimney means, not a melt down, but fresh chocolate!
On the other hand I know how frustrating it can be to explain that things aren't going well when you don't even know yet what isn't going well. I, for one, just don't want to be a Verruca Salt about this event, know what I mean?
Thanks Logos for your Hard Work. As far as I am concerned you can each take time to have a piece of cake and cup of tea. I'll survive this OK.
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Yes, but think how traumatic it could have been if DateLife.Com were up and running ... and a few of the subscribers were experiencing testosterone overload.[:P]
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I cant imagine for those SDA pastor who had to use their Logos ipad or proclaim to preach today. Mustve been their worst Sunday ever.
I would have been super pissed if had to preach today and my notes was gone. Standing up there on pulpit like a dummy.
logos is playing dangerously
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~
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I'm not SDA but am in Australia. Church finished 4 hours ago, so no Proclaim. We fell back onto ProPresenter and I think we'll stay there. All the time spent building the service structure in Proclaim was wasted
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I preached from my notebook, I just worked offline. most everything is on my tablet, and i try to review my sermon and make sure everything is ready if i can't sync to logos.
we have local internet problems so.. even though I like to keep in sync with the servers its not so big a deal.
I just wait and trust that Logos will be back soon.
L4 BS, L5 RB & Gold, L6 S & R Platinum, L7 Platinum, L8 Baptist Platinum, L9 Baptist Platinum, L10 Baptist Silver
2021 MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" 16GB 512GB SSD, running MacOS Monterey iPad Mini 6, iPhone 11.0 -
MJ. Smith said:
Having been on the inside of several critical failures, I'd like to give another perspective. For those working on the problem there is nothing as annoying as someone from management interrupting every 10 minutes to learn your current status. As you are identifying a problem anything breaking concentration slows down identifying the problem. So please, until the problem is identified, don't expect more than an hourly "we don't know."
Once the problem is identified and the solution determined, take the first estimate of time until things return to normal that is given by the techies and double it ... in the pressure something is bound to go wrong. The one I remember best is a 4th of July drunk driver taking out a power pole. We'd been discussing adding backup power.
If things are going wrong in off-hours or weekends-holidays, don't expect the techies to have the company's understanding of time zones or remember what form of communications the users may try. Techies tend to be extremely competent in their area of expertize ... and highly upwardly mobile if they can place that in a broader context.
And when they finally identify the problem, have implemented a solution and are willing to give you estimates as to what functions will be available when, half the users are going to read the notice and say "I don't understand what you're saying" while the other half are saying "but are you using xxx or yyy did you consider zzz so it won't happen again." Know which half you fall within, laugh a bit at yourself and give the people working for at least 28 hours on this a break. Monday morning is just fine for the post mortem and future planning - and by then they should be capable of broaden their perspective a bit. It has been highly focused for many many hours.
I am the Director of Systems Infrastructure for one of the top-five global IT companies. We specialize in business consulting, systems integration, and IT outsourcing services. We have thousands of clients globally and a vast number of those who rely on us for Data Centre services, server, storage and network management of their business systems. We ultimately support millions of end-users and customers of our Client-base.
So, similar to MJ, I would like to provide my perspective and it is a little different.
And we sometimes have outages (hopefully no one from my executive management team is reading this). Failed hardware. Failed operating systems upgrades. Bad code. Corrupted data bases. Application coding problems. Network failures with various telecomm providers. Environmental issues. Nefarious activities. Human mistakes. And on and on and on. No matter what the cause, keeping your clients posted on the issues and updating them with periodic progress reports is so fundamentally necessary in managing these situations and effectively communicating expectations.
Problems happen. Experience and internal processes and procedures help companies like Faithlife effectively manage these types of issues. Having an effective way to deal with them and keeping communication lines open should not be an option. And I am not talking about communicating every nit-picky detail, but keeping people posted about the general nature of the issue and the expected restoration time is the minimal type of communication that should be happening.
Providing internal and external communication updates is absolutely key to help set expectations and keep people informed. How many people clicked on a Twitter or Facebook link taking them to the free book offered or pricing special, but only to receive a script/runtime error in their browser? Or a blank web page that tried to load for a period of time? Or gateway timeouts?
It took hours before the Faithlife ‘sad little sheep’ was posted to the logos.com site and then it disappeared again and then it came back again. How many Faithlife customers wasted their time checking to see if they had an internet or PC problem? How many Faithlife End-Users received a script error in their browser and wondered if they might have picked up a virus. How many proclaim users were struggling with issues? How many iPad Bible App users deleted the App and re-installed it because that is often the only way to resolve with iPad Faithlife/Logos Bible App issues.
How many of us Faithlife Users had problems with the website with the L5 and L6 releases? With items available/not available in certain packages and bundles. Et cetera.
These types of troubles are great opportunities for the Marketing department at Faithlife to kick into gear (yes, even on a weekend) and make some posts and try to alleviate ill will via the various social media sites that Faithlife leverages for sales and marketing purposes. Eight hours ago was the last time an update to the Logos Facebook page was made and nine hours for Twitter.
A first step to helping ease issues for the Faithlife Users should be to immediately redirect all their various branded (Vyrso, Verbum, Logos, and others) traffic to an status page—this is so incredibly simple to have done and can even be automated. Logos.com has it sometimes, but I have never seen it used for faithlife.com, vyrso.com, or verbum.com. In fact, the verbum.com tells people to call into the toll-free number and order Verbum 6.
And MJ, I agree with you, technical folks very frequently assume they are going to provide a temporary fix or resolution for an issue in less time than it will actually take. That is why IT management needs to be involved and be the ‘voice of reason’.
Is it the techies’ responsibility to provide the customers of the various Faithlife brands of products? Probably not, as it is not a very wise use of their time. Is it the responsibility of Faithlife to provide service restoration updates to its customer base through to a fix or resolution? Absolutely!!
I really, really like Faithlife. The vast majority of the Faithlife folks I have interacted with are very good and competent at what they do. I consider both my current and past sales rep (who left the company) friends. I have made a huge investment in Logos resources and am planning on continuing to expand my library with them. They are my Bible software vendor of choice—hands down! This is not a bash Faithlife post, but it is ‘there is a significantly better way to do things’ type of post.
I can truly empathize with the problems that Faithlife has experienced with their infrastructure this weekend because I have been there—both as a technical specialist in the day and as the person that must provide external communications to the Client and Users! I also know how much better the internal and external experience can be when appropriate levels and channels of communication are leveraged.
I don’t for one moment think that anyone at Faithlife would want to cause anyone of us grief, but it is what sometimes has happened. For this weekend’s issues, some Users will be negatively affected and others will not even realize an outage occurred. But for those affected, more effective communication would have made a positive difference and would have avoided wasted time and/or worries from many Faithlife users.
Bottom line 1: From a technical perspective, should I as a Logos Users expect that Logos.com and the related services be available 7x24? If so, then Faithlife needs to make some changes to their infrastructure to support such. If 7x24 availability is not their goal, then I believe that should be communicated so that people will not have an unrealistic ‘unwritten’ expectation.
Bottom line 2: From a communications perspective, I truly believe there is a great deal of improvement that Faithlife can make with both their internal and external communications—changes that will benefit themselves and their vast User base.
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Actually Wayne, I agree with you and hope Faithlife learns the value of preplanning including disaster recovery. I also agree that some people will have experienced a significant loss. But I also believe in letting the techies be techies and to express our frustrations and anger to people who can do something about it. But then again, I'm a great believe in the conservation of energy - especially mine. Too many great things to be doing to waste energy where it is ineffective ... but that's just me.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Wayne,
Thank you for your analysis. We're already discussion many of the points that you raise, and you can expect to see our operational and communication processes improve in time. For now, I'm updating the following thread with progress.
https://community.logos.com/forums/p/96616/665726.aspx#665726
Jim
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A viewpoint from a non-technical, side... (Directed at no one in particular).
Honestly, I am shocked, and somewhat embarrassed by the behavior and language some displayed the last couple of days on this forum. When did having the right to voice an opinion give a license to speak so rudely and without love? Between the unbelievably distasteful, inappropriate remarks on the "dating" thread and the reaction I have read about Logos being down, I wonder what our Savior thinks about how we Christians are representing Him.
Every day, when my children walk out the door, I say the same thing. The conversation goes like this.
Me: "Remember..."
Son: "I know Mom, Who I am and Whose I am."
Me: "Who are you?"
Son: "I am Luke F. and I represent this family and its name."
Me: "Whose are you?"
Son: "I am son to the King Most High, a physical representative of God in Heaven."
Me: "Okay, sweetie. Have fun and remember to represent both with honor."
I know it sounds cheesy, but I did it with my daughter (now 24 in grad school) and now my son (who is 16). My daughter told me that while she would role her eyes every time here at home, she found that now that she is in college, she still can hear that dialogue in her head every time she walks out the door.
I guess my point is that we need to behave the same on line as we do IRL, which makes me wonder if some of those who speak so rudely in the virtual world behave the same IRL. I understand that frustrations, such as the site being down, can cause us to be "snappy," but I am also reminded that the core of who we are is manifested more in how we RE-act than how we act.
Just saying...
Cynthia
Romans 8:28-38
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Some really good advice, Cynthia. And you are doing something great as a mom to teach your children well. Thanks.
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I worked in a large WAN and Datacenter for years. If and when a failure occurred we were always inundated with grumpy people and comments -- so much so, that to get the job done and matter resolved, we would actually shut off communication to all but the critical personnel actually working on the problem.
The fact that there are people working on the matter, and the ocassional techie update for guys like me, is all the information that is needed.
For those who continue to complain, this issue is simply a momentary non-linearity in an otherwise smooth operation. Humans deal with such things daily. I am finding it rather amusing the amount of complaints, off-hand comments -- shall we just call them what they are - rude? -- that are cropping up here among a group of people who should be, or claim to be, facing their world with a different perspective than the world.
To the Logos staff -- many thanks for the work you do, even when it necessitates putting your weekend plans on hold, to keep services available.
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Great reply! We have done something like this with our kids as well. Cheesy? Maybe. But like you said, that has gone on with them now that they're older.
Great reply Cynthia.
Cynthia in Florida said:A viewpoint from a non-technical, side... (Directed at no one in particular).
Honestly, I am shocked, and somewhat embarrassed by the behavior and language some displayed the last couple of days on this forum. When did having the right to voice an opinion give a license to speak so rudely and without love? Between the unbelievably distasteful, inappropriate remarks on the "dating" thread and the reaction I have read about Logos being down, I wonder what our Savior thinks about how we Christians are representing Him.
Every day, when my children walk out the door, I say the same thing. The conversation goes like this.
Me: "Remember..."
Son: "I know Mom, Who I am and Whose I am."
Me: "Who are you?"
Son: "I am Luke F. and I represent this family and its name."
Me: "Whose are you?"
Son: "I am son to the King Most High, a physical representative of God in Heaven."
Me: "Okay, sweetie. Have fun and remember to represent both with honor."
I know it sounds cheesy, but I did it with my daughter (now 24 in grad school) and now my son (who is 16). My daughter told me that while she would role her eyes every time here at home, she found that now that she is in college, she still can hear that dialogue in her head every time she walks out the door.
I guess my point is that we need to behave the same on line as we do IRL, which makes me wonder if some of those who speak so rudely in the virtual world behave the same IRL. I understand that frustrations, such as the site being down, can cause us to be "snappy," but I am also reminded that the core of who we are is manifested more in how we RE-act than how we act.
Just saying...
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Redundancy -- As one who also makes presentations, has taught classes in a tech environment, and has led group studies, I know that I am responsible for my own redundant options - I should not assume that a single service will be available at the moment I need it. Thus, my notes, slides, optional information and such, are saved locally, copies uploaded to a second cloud location, and I must also have a secondary Internet connection option readily available.
The complainers here have simply forgotten this simple self sourced basic rule of thumb regarding all things tech. Datacenters are not immune to failures. I once worked in one where both the primary and secondary backup options failed in the same day. Stuff happens. The end user will do well to be thankful they have the sort of tech we do, but always assume responsibility for their own secondary access options.
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Paul Coleman said:
The complainers here have simply forgotten this simple self sourced basic rule of thumb regarding all things tech.
A lot of assuming there.
I went to church and everything was fine as I am always prepared for such kind of eventualities. I am super cautious and I even back up google drive to dropbox as well as local backup options. I keep paper notes as well as the ones on my ipad and I always have a traditional Bible on hand.
But does that mean I should not complain?
I make sure that I download the most important resources to my iPad and now I find that even those are inaccessible because the app wants to sign in before I can use them.
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And here is an opinion from someone who lives in the service provider side of cloud services:
When you move your services to the cloud, redundancy is not optional. You need everything to be redundant: Your servers, your network back hauls, your switching stack, your DNS providers, your virtual servers should be in multiple regions, and you should have in place a tested and verified procedure for disaster recovery by simulating a failure before it happens.
It is true that we, as users, should plan for outages. Thank God for the desktop version of Logos, where I have my entire library already downloaded. But when a company such as Logos makes the move to providing cloud-based services, they have a fiduciary responsibility to plan for failure - even catastrophic failure - even a "main building got bombed" failure.
So on the one hand, stop bugging Logos, and let them get the job done. I've been in their shoes. It's not pretty, and when the villagers are storming the castle with torches and pitchforks, it's not going to help get things fixed any faster.
But once the dust settles, and Logos has the application stack back up and running, they do have some explaining to do.
Frankly, I cannot trust the mobile platform at all at this point. Anything that is relying upon their servers being up should be looked upon with skepticism. Don't trust it to be there when you need it.
I hope this changes eventually, but Logos will have to rebuild our trust to get there.
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Brother Paul,
Things are not that simple. We are no longer in the age where only people with technical skills use computing devices. When my wife turns on her iPad she expects it to work and to see her stuff. She doesn't know anything about redundancy, or backups. Those things never cross her mind.
How many people do you think are inconvenienced when gmail goes down? I don't think that very many of them have a backup plan.
Paul Coleman said:Redundancy -- As one who also makes presentations, has taught classes in a tech environment, and has led group studies, I know that I am responsible for my own redundant options - I should not assume that a single service will be available at the moment I need it. Thus, my notes, slides, optional information and such, are saved locally, copies uploaded to a second cloud location, and I must also have a secondary Internet connection option readily available.
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Well, I have never used Logos to preach from. I type my notes in Word format, save in PDF, and use a PDF reader on my iPad for those notes. Proclaim never made an impression with me, seemed to complex for what we try and do...
That being said, any failure in a complex system points out unforeseen weaknesses in a system. We can MMQ (Monday morning quarterback) the problem form out lofty perches...or we can simply wait for the problem to be resolved.
This failure just happened to hit while I was trying to do an O/S upgrade on my desktop in my office, so I lost all of my resources on my desktop until the Logos servers come back to life...hopefully by Monday...otherwise it will be working from my laptop...
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This is an upsetting turn of events. But there are other Bible softwares out there that do not rely on servers, if you use Logos you have to live with the limitations there are. I will admit i was a big disappointed to learn that in the event of Logos going offline or disappearing the mobile apps will no longer function with our downloaded books, but this is not overly surprising to me either. Hopefully this will not happen again (we are told a back up is being set up, hindsight says it should have been before this but again not the end of the world), but all in all it is an inconvenience and not a disaster.
-Dan
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Stuff happens; unfortunately even to logos. hope they are able to get back to their weekend (or what's left) soon.
sounded to me like they had already begun the redundancy (not as ideal as a different region, but I digress) Process. They will get it sorted in time. Until then I am glad that I have redundancy.
L2 lvl4 (...) WORDsearch, all the way through L10,
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abondservant said:
Until then I am glad that I have redundancy.
Yes, this is a good reminder for us to also have redundancy on a personal level. I now do a full "system image" of my main hard drive each week alternating between two different backup drives. I had to learn the hard way.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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It's been several months since I backed up kit and caboodle. This is a dramatic reminder that it is high time.
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At the very least, I backup Logos, My Documents, and a few other very important folders. I don't bother too much anymore with the full system backups.
I make sure that I have a copy of each programs installation files and SN's in the event that I have to reinstall anything.
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Erwin Stull, Sr. said:
At the very least, I backup Logos, My Documents, and a few other very important folders.
I should clarify that I also back up all my Logos files each week by using a script that I had set up which updates anything that changes from week to week.
Erwin Stull, Sr. said:I don't bother too much anymore with the full system backups.
I do a system backup also for the simplicity of being able to get back to where I was quickly in case of a major failure.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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As far as the academic world is concerned, this is the WORST possible weekend for a break down, because this was the weekend meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion (SBL-AAR). In fact, it has to be embarrassing.
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Ted Weis said:
As far as the academic world is concerned, this is the WORST possible weekend for a break down, because this was the weekend meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion (SBL-AAR). In fact, it has to be embarrassing.
And Bob Pritchett was there, as he posted Friday on the thread which is soon to be deleted (but this quote saved here for posterity):
Bob Pritchett said:I am hearing you. I have read every post, and will continue to follow the conversation closely. (I am at ETS and AAR/SBL, so I can't post all day, but will when I can.)
I think it would have been helpful if Bob himself had posted a reassuring note that he was aware of what was going on over the past two days with the server outage, and that he would take steps when he got back to be sure it never happened again.
Martin Diers said:And here is an opinion from someone who lives in the service provider side of cloud services:
When you move your services to the cloud, redundancy is not optional. You need everything to be redundant: Your servers, your network back hauls, your switching stack, your DNS providers, your virtual servers should be in multiple regions, and you should have in place a tested and verified procedure for disaster recovery by simulating a failure before it happens.
Logos needs to hire you, Martin!
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First, thank you Faithlife Team for bringing the system back to life, and thank you too everyone that was praying.
I think both the Faithlife Team / company and we the customers have a common interest: both the Company and the bible software system must consistently deliver optimum service where and as when required. It then follows that neither side will deliberately do anything that will jeopardize the good health of any part of or the whole system.
With that in mind, as far as I can remember since I have been using this Logos bible software, what happened to the whole system these last few days is the worst accident I have witnessed.
I do hope that when the dust has settled (very quickly I hope too):
- Faithlife will diligently identify the issues and begin to address them with alacrity, and with the aim of reducing to the barest minimum the possibility of such damaging disruption happening again. I know this is something made by man and like most things from man, failure at some point is inherent in it. But such failure can be so reduced that the consequences will be very minimal.
- We, the customers should diligently revisit our response to things when the system is not able to deliver optimally as it should for whatever reason: paying special attention to how we can best be supportive and helpful while putting our complaints and problems forward to those who can do something about them, and while making our frustrations known too at such times.
For am sure that just as the customers were shocked, perplexed, angry and frustrated as they were caught unawares with some not having credible alternatives or backups, the Faithlife team must have been angry at themselves for being caught unawares to such devastating effect for so long, and would have been severely stretched and stressed too in their attempts to resuscitate the system.
I want to believe that all stake holders (the company and those who use their services) belong to the family of faith. Let us all therefore keep all parties or stakeholders in our prayers as I believe we are also praying people.
May the Almighty God:
- grant that any fractures in the relationship between Faithlife and its customers be quickly repaired, healed and restored;
- uphold the Faithlife Team / company and all theirs, give them the wisdom and diligence and whatever resources they need to make the software the best bible software in the world and also much less expensive;
- bless and keep all Logos bible software users and all theirs, give all of us the wisdom and love that we need to put the software and what we acquire through its use to the best interest and benefit of our fellowmen, drawing many more into His kingdom; and to through all our efforts continue to honour and glorify Him every day;
- LORD, ever draw ALL of us closer to you, in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
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As I posted in another thread, as much as I appreciate the Logos software, it is still more business than ministry. The money that many of us have invested in Logos, for me it has been over 15 years, would demand that contingencies be available for every type of service disruption. The turn around time for this resolution comparable to other IT services would not rank high. This post is not meant to kick the Logos employees down but a reminder that as a business the company as an obligation to do better, much better. I was shocked that I couldn't even bring up the Logos website for a lengthy amount of time. When it was available, there wasn't a good explanation of what was happening and what would be the resolution time. I still promote Logos to every pastor and missionary I meet but until this weekend, I didn't know the potential of not having access to your own data. For those who have said that we should rely on the Holy Spirit and Logos in other posts, that is a red herring. I have not read any mean spirited or any snarky posts regarding this weekend's events. Just the frustration that paying customers expect from any company with which they are doing business with.
Don
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It seems to me that every time something like this happens that voices get raised about how we all need to be more gracious. However, I have not heard anything ungracious in the forums. Some of us have been quite direct about our dissatisfaction and expectations of a business. And that's what logos is, a business. They are not made of eggshells and a bit of criticism won't hurts them. Actually, it will help them.0
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Wayne Clarke said:
These types of troubles are great opportunities for the Marketing department at Faithlife to kick into gear (yes, even on a weekend) and make some posts and try to alleviate ill will via the various social media sites that Faithlife leverages for sales and marketing purposes. Eight hours ago was the last time an update to the Logos Facebook page was made and nine hours for Twitter.
What a novel idea, using the Marketing team to "alleviate ill will" and market Good Will [;)]
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Cynthia in Florida said:
Every day, when my children walk out the door, I say the same thing. The conversation goes like this.
Me: "Remember..."
Son: "I know Mom, Who I am and Whose I am."
Me: "Who are you?"
Son: "I am Luke F. and I represent this family and its name."
Me: "Whose are you?"
Son: "I am son to the King Most High, a physical representative of God in Heaven."
Me: "Okay, sweetie. Have fun and remember to represent both with honor."
awesome advice and reminder. Good job, mom!
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Correct me if I am wrong, but Charles Spurgeon did not have Logos or Proclaim and he did okay. Right? If we are relying on tech tools to make "our" message more appealing to the congregation, then we forgot it is supposed to be about "His" message. These tools are great, and I am glad Faithlife has developed them, but when they become a crutch in presenting the Gospel we begin to border on idolatry of the tools. Oh yeah, while I'm thinking about it...Peter did not have either tool, and faced physical punishment, he did okay too.
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Paul Coleman said:
Redundancy -- As one who also makes presentations, has taught classes in a tech environment, and has led group studies, I know that I am responsible for my own redundant options - I should not assume that a single service will be available at the moment I need it. Thus, my notes, slides, optional information and such, are saved locally, copies uploaded to a second cloud location, and I must also have a secondary Internet connection option readily available.
The complainers here have simply forgotten this simple self sourced basic rule of thumb regarding all things tech. Datacenters are not immune to failures. I once worked in one where both the primary and secondary backup options failed in the same day. Stuff happens. The end user will do well to be thankful they have the sort of tech we do, but always assume responsibility for their own secondary access options.
There are 2 sides to the coin, Paul.
First of all, I totally agree with you. Ultimately we as users have the responsibility for our stuff and our tools. But this leads me to the other side of the coin: It would be wonderful for Logos to design a system where users could backup their MOBILE downloaded books, notes, etc.
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Rosie Perera said:
I think it would have been helpful if Bob himself had posted a reassuring note that he was aware of what was going on over the past two days with the server outage, and that he would take steps when he got back to be sure it never happened again.
emphasis mine [Y]
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Cynthia in Florida said:
A viewpoint from a non-technical, side... (Directed at no one in particular).
Honestly, I am shocked, and somewhat embarrassed by the behavior and language some displayed the last couple of days on this forum. When did having the right to voice an opinion give a license to speak so rudely and without love? Between the unbelievably distasteful, inappropriate remarks on the "dating" thread and the reaction I have read about Logos being down, I wonder what our Savior thinks about how we Christians are representing Him.
Every day, when my children walk out the door, I say the same thing. The conversation goes like this.
Me: "Remember..."
Son: "I know Mom, Who I am and Whose I am."
Me: "Who are you?"
Son: "I am Luke F. and I represent this family and its name."
Me: "Whose are you?"
Son: "I am son to the King Most High, a physical representative of God in Heaven."
Me: "Okay, sweetie. Have fun and remember to represent both with honor."
I know it sounds cheesy, but I did it with my daughter (now 24 in grad school) and now my son (who is 16). My daughter told me that while she would role her eyes every time here at home, she found that now that she is in college, she still can hear that dialogue in her head every time she walks out the door.
I guess my point is that we need to behave the same on line as we do IRL, which makes me wonder if some of those who speak so rudely in the virtual world behave the same IRL. I understand that frustrations, such as the site being down, can cause us to be "snappy," but I am also reminded that the core of who we are is manifested more in how we RE-act than how we act.
Just saying...
Amen Sister in Christ [Y]
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Agreed. In another post I suggested that a software modification that allows Logos to run regardless of network or datacenter status as a default. Another idea might include LAN syncing. I certainly value the fact that my devices all have access to the data I create. I have a couple of apps/software that have LAN syncing as an option and have proved invaluable during a handful of times when my gateway was not available.
That said, once Logos came back online for me this morning, I changed the automatic update option in Tools to "not" automatically update. With it enabled, a notification appears regarding any updates of library additions that are ready to be added. This way, I can ignore the updates and get on with my use of the program instead of waiting for many minutes (most of the time) before I can use the software. I have left the "Internet Services" option enabled for some features on because I am not sure if turning it off will affect my personal data/doc syncs.
While there are probably many things that will have to be dealt with by the IT team in the postmortem meetings, I am still happy with the overall performance and the increased research capabilities I have using it and look forward to some changes that might help in avoiding this rare catastrophic failure and its affects.
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My wife is also one of those who just expect everything to work. [:)] I think my posts have become a bit spread out over this forum but in them I have pointed out both the necessity of cloud service redundancy and some personal responsibility to create our own backups of critical data. I understand that it does/may require software to include offline backup options that may or may not be a part of the package. To this end, it may be a good time, during the postmortem meetings to address and research the end user option -- potentially making local host backups the default. The point is that with some of us relying rather heavily on our Logos library for research, any datacenter problem, or ease of access to our own work, should be all but invisible -- connectivity and database access problems should not affect the immediate user interface. I do understand that some users with smaller systems and storage capabilities would find they will have to rely almost completely on cloud redundancy. For those of us (I have multiple terabytes of storage because of my IT background as a network engineer) that have the capacity for local storage the default local backup might be rather useful. At this point, however, I am more concerned about Logos working only on my local host because my intent for purchasing it was to allow me to take my work (research and ministry) into areas without any, or any reliable, Internet access. In other words, I need Logos to work well on a non-connected host.
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The responses here have been much better than some I came across in other media sites. One pastor, whom I will not name because I prefer to assume he was just having a "really bad day", ranted at such volume as to cause me some concern about his church. I will just leave it at that. There is no real good reason to not address this matter in a civil and adult manner. You are right about Logos being a business and that this event will give occasion for improvement.
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Mark Prim said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but Charles Spurgeon did not have Logos or Proclaim and he did okay. Right? If we are relying on tech tools to make "our" message more appealing to the congregation, then we forgot it is supposed to be about "His" message. These tools are great, and I am glad Faithlife has developed them, but when they become a crutch in presenting the Gospel we begin to border on idolatry of the tools. Oh yeah, while I'm thinking about it...Peter did not have either tool, and faced physical punishment, he did okay too.
[Y]
Sometimes we act like the Holy Spirit is wringing His hands wondering what He is going to do when some pastor's Logos desktop won't start or can't use his blessed I-phone or Android.
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[Y]
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I wonder how much of the outrage is from lack of humility - that a cloud disconnect would dare interfere with my goals, my convenience, and my looking good in the pulpit. Why else would there be so much bitterness?
The cloud has inherent risks - it could be an internet service provider that goes down, not Logos / Faithlife, and we'd have the same inability to get to cloud-based services.Caveat emptor with the cloud. Plan for outages. I'm high-risk - running everything on a Chromebook. Still, there are ways to plan for outages even on that cloud-centric platform. It's just wisdom knowing we rely on imperfect systems and then planning accordingly.
Perhaps some of the rage should be directed inward for not adequately planning for outages, which inevitably occur. A little foresight, and this outage would not cripple anyone.
Logos inconvenienced me this weekend, at worst. But my responsibility to God's people is not contingent on the internet being on 24x7.
If Logos / Faithlife needs to make business or technical changes as a result, they've already said they would, and we don't need to heap burning coals on their head.
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I can't complain. Logos has done well by me 99 percent of the time! I'll take those odds any day!
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[Y]
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Mark Prim said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but Charles Spurgeon did not have Logos or Proclaim and he did okay. Right? If we are relying on tech tools to make "our" message more appealing to the congregation, then we forgot it is supposed to be about "His" message. These tools are great, and I am glad Faithlife has developed them, but when they become a crutch in presenting the Gospel we begin to border on idolatry of the tools. Oh yeah, while I'm thinking about it...Peter did not have either tool, and faced physical punishment, he did okay too.
Probably he didn't. I wasn't actually there. But....think what he could have done if he did have Logos! And James and Peter and Paul and Luther and Calvin and our own dear Pastor Gargle--imagine if they all had Logos! I wonder if they are all (except Pst. Gargle) up in Heaven looking down drooling.
Aye, but the times they are good.
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Ted Weis said:
As far as the academic world is concerned, this is the WORST possible weekend for a break down, because this was the weekend meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion (SBL-AAR). In fact, it has to be embarrassing.
I do hope none of them had a presentation that required online access during the outing! That would really be embarrassing. Not to talk about the poor sales folks. Imagine trying to sell Proclaim this weekend...[:S]
Yet, in spite of all that, every other weekend around now may have been even worse. The last weekend in October would have meant they'd had to postpone the launch. The following two weekends would have meant severe losses in sales, as would next weekend with Black Friday. And last weekend would presumably have meant postponing the launch party.
Mac Pro (late 2013) OS 12.6.2
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Paul Coleman said:
In another post I suggested that a software modification that allows Logos to run regardless of network or datacenter status as a default. Another idea might include LAN syncing. I certainly value the fact that my devices all have access to the data I create. I have a couple of apps/software that have LAN syncing as an option and have proved invaluable during a handful of times when my gateway was not available.
I would like this type of modification as well. When I first bought L5 a few months ago then upgraded to L6 I told the salesman that I was somewhat disappointed that I could not buy it as a stand alone program, I am not a fan of having to use the web for some of my program. I want to be able to take my laptop to the cabin work on what I want to and back up to my own external hard drive. I currently back up several computers to an external hard drive because I realize how important my work is. In contrast if i have to use there system as part of the process 1.) it limits my work when I do not have a connection and 2.) it's faithlife's way of trying to CONTROL me and what I do AND I DO NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL!!!
WHY CANT ALL ASPECTS OF THE PROGRAM L6 I PURCHASED BE STANDALONE FROM MY OWN COMPUTER!!!! I wouldn't need to worry about your stinking website problems. Just my .02
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it's been found difficult and not tried.
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