status update 2: electric boogaloo

[karzilla]

Some DNS changes were made yesterday that manifested themselves in two troublesome ways:

1. Emailed replies to comments were not being delivered correctly for several hours, but I believe they started showing up again about 8 hours ago. If you have an emailed comment reply that still hasn't been delivered this morning, you may want to try sending it again, and let us know if you are still seeing delays.

2. Some users have been seeing DNS resolution errors when visiting pages on our site. As we come up on 24 hours since the changes were made, these should fade away, but if you do run into this problem, I'm told that refreshing the page while holding down the shift key is a thing to try that might help.

Thanks for hanging in there with us! I am hoping for a quieter day today. :)

Comments

[vera_l]

FYI, I'm still getting intermittent DNS resolution errors. Thank you very much for the info to use shift-reload; that's been working.

[thelongcon]

I've been noticing comment delays, though so far, it's just been today.

[denise]

Delays in comment emails getting to your inbox, you mean? That's probably your mail server being slow to catch up with our DNS changes -- let us know if it's still happening in a day or two.

[strawberry_science]

Different user here, but this has been happening to me and people on my plurk timeline for about two days now. Delays I've timed have been anywhere from 45 minutes to 65 minutes late, using gmail.

[soulofmagus]

Seconding this reply.

For me, the delays started kicking in yesterday, and have continued on through today. The average wait is around an hour, though I get my notifications in the DW inbox itself within a few minutes of receiving a reply.

[denise]

Unfortunately, we're really limited in what we can do for problems like emails being slow to get to your inbox -- we send them out immediately, but they can be delayed for many reasons on the other end. Your email provider in particular likes to "greylist" mail whenever senders make any network changes -- they reject the first attempt to send the email and make you try it again later. (The theory being, spammers are less likely to make the second attempt.) There's really nothing that can be done for it but to wait while they decide that we're a legit mail sender again.

Your provider in particular is REALLY PICKY about what they'll accept and how they'll accept it, and being the 900-lb gorilla of the email world, they like to throw their weight around and make people who send them a lot of email (and we do) jump through all kinds of hoops. We jump, but that doesn't really stop them from arbitrarily deciding to fuck with our mail anyway. It's frustrating and it's annoying and it makes us look bad because it looks like we can't send mail out reliably, but we really are, I promise; your provider is just delaying it because we moved some things around with our network and that apparently destroys our entire reputation with them and they're going to make us build it back up.

(Sorry, this frustrates the shit out of me. I'm probably being too grumpy.)

I'd just refresh your on-DW inbox for a while.

[midgardener]

Mother. Friggin. Greylisting. GODSPEED AND GOOD LUCK DW TEAM.

[strawberry_science]

I'm sorry that you have to deal with that. It does sound terrible of the providers to do that even though this is for a reliable use, and you're hardly a new sender for them to deal with.

Thank you for the information. I didn't see it posted anywhere widespread (like twitter or the plurk feed), which is what had me seeking out this post. It's going to be more widespread now to inform users, I think, so hopefully they too will be more patient while the providers get their acts together.

For what it's worth, if I came off as sounding frustrated too, I want to apologize. I can't imagine the headaches it is causing on your end. I'm patient enough to wait this out and this is the one time I'm thankful that the emails go to the DW inbox with great speed.