Scheduled Website Maintenance

[steveganz]

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 16th, the primary partition that pdga.com is stored on ran out of space. This caused a number of cached pages to fail to display. We have fixed the problem as of Friday, March 17th at 10:30am PST and all content appears to be back online.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused and thank you for your patience.

[steveganz]

Over the past few weeks we've been making adjustments to how content is delivered and cached by the web server. Hopefully you have seen some improvements in the load times of most pages on the site. Your mileage may vary of course, since the perception of speed is governed not just by the web server, but your local connection, your web browser and the operating system you're using as well.

In the example below, you will see a chart graphing the average page load times for the tour schedule page which is the most visited page on pdga.com. What started out as an average of 13 seconds 6 weeks ago is now approaching an average of 5 seconds.

In terms of web server performance and optimization, things are definitely getting better and we hope you have been able to notice.

We will continue to monitor performance and optimize your experience however we can.

[steveganz]

I have begun to reorganize the main navigation menu items in an effort to make finding links more intuitive. This will be an ongoing process but I wanted to point out what has been done thus far.

There were a number of links pertaining to subsets of PDGA members and player statistics under the "PDGA Tour" menu. I have moved these links underneath the "Membership" menu since they have more to do with the membership than the tour. Items remaining under the "PDGA Tour" menu will be related to tournaments or series of events.

If you can't find what you're looking for or have any feedback, please let me know.

[steveganz]

On or about May 13th, PDGA.com began experiencing sporadic but escalating performance issues that came to a head this past weekend when we experienced our first significant downtime in several months. We've been working day and night since then to diagnose the problem and take every step necessary to stabilize the site. We are making progress towards a resolution and continue to monitor the situation.

We offer you our sincerest apologies and thank you for your continued patience. We want you to know that we are making a significant investment in technology over the next 2 to 3 years. Doing things the right way takes time and we are committed to building a platform that places a premium on performance and reliability.

In the mean time, we're doing everything we can to keep the current site up and running and will continue to make improvements whenever and wherever we can.

For updates on outages and downtime in the future, please follow @PDGA on Twitter.

http://www.pdga.com/announcements/website-outages

[steveganz]

PDGA.com was unreachable last night, June 14th, for about an hour due to a power outage in Amazon's US-EAST-1 Region that effected a segment of the Availability Zone that our services are located in.

[steveganz]

We recently published some changes to the way tournament results are displayed to implement one of the most frequently requested enhancements: displaying the historical rating of a player when viewing past tournament results.

Previously, all views of tournament results would display a players current rating no matter when the event took place. Now, the player rating displayed for Official Results is the rating the player had at the time of the event. This includes current and former members.

On the Current Registration and Unofficial Results views, the player rating displayed for active members is their current rating. If a player is not a current member, we do not display a rating.

http://www.pdga.com/announcements/website-update

[steveganz]

We've just released an updated version of the tournament administration system. It's called the PDGA Tournament Manager and it works just like the old system only better. It includes a ton of bug fixes, it's easier to use, it's faster, and it's more mobile friendly which will make live scoring a lot less stressful. New features include a new Players information page that will highlight PDGA members who:

1) Haven't passed the Official's Exam for NTs and Majors,
2) Aren't current for A-Tiers and above,
3) Have ratings that are too high for the division in which they are registered
4) Are too young or too old for the division in which they are registered

This is just the first of many improvements in an effort to make the lives of tournament directors easier. If you have any difficulty using the new PDGA Tournament Manager, please don't hesitate to contact us.

[steveganz]

On November 15th, 2012 between 1:30am and 2:00am EDT, we will be completing a mandatory system update to our database servers. Any impact on website availability is not expected to last for more than a few minutes.

If you have any questions, please email technology@pdga.com.