Grateful Dead

What's with the new layout? Do NOT like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pages are much slower to load since this latest update was rolled out and the useful forum feature where posts are noted as "new" seems to have disappeared. Also, for changes of this magnitude, it would have been nice to have a note about the update on the front page.

can ya tell if there are new posts?...guess I like the editing option, though...just used it to add THIS

What the heck?! I want my old Dead.net back.p.s. Johnman, I guess the edit option is nice. But, the filter is gone from the recent posts page. Also, pages often aren't loading for me. Maybe it's my connection? I 'spose I'll just hafta be patient. What other choice is there?

but had posted here and now don't see it. Will try again

OK I see what I did-hit preview and not "save". Previous post was apologizing for my outburst-because after closer examination new changes are not soo bad. Saw them on the same morning that FB went berserk with nasty changes, so mood was foul! I am sorry!!

So are you thinking that the "coincidental timing" of the FB and Dead.net changes are designed to cull the older, more change-averse crowd from the scene? Seems like the techs are still tinkering here. As prone as I am to mistake-making, I'm enjoying the edit function as a face-saving safety net (just add spellcheck and I'll be ready to roll). Still not quite sure why the reply button doesn't link the reply to the original post, but maybe that's coming as well.

The site is much faster this morning and yeah: the new forum features work well too.

...I can only visit this forum from recent posts (Technical Problems - Forums, Features, Etc.) if there's been a new post. I can't click on the topic (it times out) only where it says '1 new' for example. In that case it hops over just fine. Anybody else experiencing this? The only other qualm I have is that you cannot filter 'out' forums. I used to filter out the Vineyard posts when checking 'Recent posts'. Am I just missing it? Other than that, lookin' ok. Again, I like the 'edit' option on posts as I'm a stickler for saying what I want to say - and I can add something to my original post instead of saying 'oh yeah, and I forgot about this...' later on, etc. P.S. The 'Shows & Lyrics' section isn't allowing a 'search by year', it toggles to 'search by date' when I try to.

What happen to the week of 9/26/11?

Here's the Tech page and I see it's not just me who can't get pm to work. Knowing that at least one other person is suffering this issue is so damn comforting! I'm sure the crack tech crew will be all over it! Maybe it's fixed already. Can I pm myself?

Mornin' marye,Just tried sending you a pm. Looked like it worked ok this morning. Gee, hope I didn't wake ya up :-)

Jam of the Week for one, and a HUGE chunk of previous Taper's Section entries. Please tell me reports of the demise of JOTW and the Taper's Section archive are greatly overstated. On another note, Happy Halloween. Pumpkins!

I can no longer go to a specific year when I'm looking up a show, something changed and now I have to start in 1965 and continously click on next if I'm trying to find a 1980's show. It used to be so easy and convenient to look up a show by year, now it is frustrating and time consuming. Please let me know the reasoning for this technical step backwards. Thank you Ken Mc

I just tried to download today's free Shakedown Street for Nov 3rd of "30 Days of the Dead".I got an empty (0 kB) php file instead of an mp3. Could this be fixed? Thanks.

This time the Shakedown mp3 came through OK.No worries.

Has anyone located the old TS entries? I miss them. Some indication of what happened to them would be nice at least. Or just having them back, . Have they been zapped for good I wonder?

I have tried several times to log into chat, but it keeps telling me I have an incorrect username or password, but I obviously am using the right one if I am able to log in here and post this, so what gives? Also, I tried to download the zip file for the complete 30 Days of Dead (here: http://174.129.28.194/30days2011.zip ) file today, and it keeps coming up that I am unable to connect. Acts like the webpage does not exist, no matter how many times I've tried. BTW, I am using Win7 and Firefox. Please help, i really would love to have the download and use the chat..

I was perusing the vineyard and the Forums and I stumbled upon some of the missing Old Taper's Section posts! Maybe some of you knew about this phenomenon. October 15-21 can be found under 'Technical Problems' under Home > Forums > Administration. Another one I've found is located in the vineyard under the heading '3 from '89 DVD Vine' on page 7, June 1-June 2009. July 26-August 2 2010 is just a few posts later under it's regular heading. It's good to know the old posts are not zapped entirely, but maybe it would help folks to get them in the correct place.

To find old Taper's Section posts, the search tool works! For example, to find the missing ones from 2008 search 'Taper's Section 2008'. You'll have to wade through 8 pages of results but persistence eventually pays off. You'll wade through more results for 2009 if you enter 'Taper's Section 2009' but it seems they're all there! Maybe no one cares except me as evidenced by the dead silence that greeted my previous post on Dec. 21. Anyway, I'm glad they're there. Peace.

I'm glad it's all still there, some damn fine music! But sometimes a glitch is a good thing. In the beginning of October something strange like that happened and a post from the Vineyard showed up under the comments in the Taper's Section where I spotted it. I've been happily trading the most amazing music ever since, so I'm thankful for life's little glitches. I'm now single-handedly keeping my local post office in business! Thanks to all the tapers, seeders and people with the kindness to pass along the beautiful music. Be well

Hey now...Would love it if tapers jam of week and gd hour could stream on iPad. When I try to load it it does not work at all.

I've been experiencing difficulties loading the chat room on my windows 7 laptop the past few days. Is anyone else experiencing similar issues?

When I look at the fan photos, they are super tiny and hard to see. The user picture is huge though and very easy to see. Is there any way to fix this?

Any news about when it will be fixed? Or can we forget it altogether?

chat roomfan photos taper's section shows and lyrics Has this site been hacked or something?

but honestly am starting to care less, because seems more and more obvious that nobody behind the site cares one tiny bit (besides marye) have given up on us. Am computer savvy enough to know that these tweaks are not that hard to fix, and that also a couple of users have offered their assistance over the years-only to be politely denied. Find myself looking here less and less, unless a particularly interesting topic comes up in the threads when I DO look.

I wish that someone would just be fricking honest, and that would keep marye out of the hard middle spot between us and them. Show "them" what I said, marye, I don't care!!

...the immense amount of spam. Creative minds could think up a way to limit it. Perhaps, a vetting process for joining the site? I agree, the site has gone squirrelly ever since about Sept. of last year. I don't know if it's for lack of effort, or caring as much as it is the futile nature of defending against the bombardment from entities that wish to destroy the site (hackers). There is a disturbing lack of transparency as to what the problems are, that there even is one, from the site administrators much less that they hear our cries and are addressing the issues.

:-P was a (half) joke! Nah but really, it's time for some hard info!!!

but I suspect that the development and administration resources available to maintain this site are overtasked and undermanned. The site is run by Rhino/WMG and I believe the staff tasked here also have other duties as well. Not to mention the typical slate of continually shifting priorities present in any corporate environment, and the revenues available from the marketing effort which ultimately make budget available to subsidize the Customer Service Experience. The somewhat recent changes to the site's overall functionality and navigation are probably due to a version upgrade of the content management system and it seems to me that upgrade process wasn't properly tested in development before being deployed into production. I believe that this caused the indexes on the underlying database for the CMS to get trashed which is probably what caused all the crossed up thread subjects and posts, many of which they seem to have gotten re-sorted out. I haven't been to the chatroom in quite some time so I can't competently speculate about any diagnosis. The last time I was there it had been effectively outsourced to a third party freeware vendor who actually provided the server and network bandwidth for production implementation. While certainly a very kind and generous posture of that vendor to take, it is also the poster child for Unsustainable Revenue Model. Despite all this, many aspects of the site do continue to work as they are supposed to, new features and initiatives such as Blair's Blog and The Dead Covers Project (and the ability to edit posts!) get introduced, and hopefully the things that get broken as the bus continues to roll will eventually draw the attention of the mechanics needed to repair them. As users, all we can do is point out when the Wheels are squeaking and we won't slow down. They're bound to grease them if we make enough sound.

That make things easier to understand. Thanks for the analysis. I appreciate it. What do you think about the spam issue? Is that fixable in your estimation? The whatzitcalled thingy on the bottom sure ain't workin'...

The introduction of any user verification process (there wasn't one when I first signed up) as well as the captcha (that's what those verification thingys are called) has slowed the spammage by at least making it extremely difficult to automate the barrage. Now it at least takes manual intervention by a "dedicated" actual human being (or reasonable facsimile thereof) sitting at a keyboard to annoy us. The best thing we as users can do is try to ignore it until marye can come along with the digital dustpan and broom and certainly not respond to it by making other posts about it. I'm assuming everyone knows better than to click on any of the proffered links. Unless, of course, any of us happen to be closet black hats with a penchant for launching DDOS attacks with whatever bot-nets we've been able to marshall, in which case by all means please extract the URL's encoded and have at them. They most certainly deserve it. The sad truth is that it's most unfortunate that marye's valuable time has to be squandered on this sort of ridiculous housekeeping. I wish I had a better answer for her and us.

...by the same token though, I notice that the spammers are invariably brand spanking new users. Would not a more stringent sign up and user verification process deter these dope wads? I bet it goes back to limited resources, right?

I don't work here, I just hang out here so all I can do is guess. In one of my favorite bars in the world (McSorely's in NYC) there are a great many interesting artifacts hanging on the walls. One of them is a hand painted sign that reads, "Be Good or Be Gone." That concept, along with the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing seems to be the operant policy regarding user accounts here. Accounts that generate spam get nuked. As far as stiffening the new user accreditation process, culturally we as Deadheads have been all about openness and inclusion, so it would logically follow that any website for, by and about us should mirror that basic posture. Engage us constructively and we are highly likely to reciprocate. Act like a jerk and the probable outcome is that you will be either ignored to death or someone will decide that they are the instrument of Karma and deal with you, one way or another. Besides, I don't know how one might implement any sort of criteria for further qualifying potential users. Would they have to pass some sort of test or something? And test what? There's more than enough "Deader-Than-Thou" floating around for my taste as it is. I think you kinda have to leave the door open, wait 'til that deal comes round, and then don't let that deal go down. But that's just how I see it. Anybody else have any bright ideas?

Sure is tough paging thru the shows until you get to 2/21/73, the discover the Attendees heading doesn't work. Can dead.net repair the access to shows by year and list those who attended?I've asked for the photo upload mechanism to be repaired too: I've discontinued trying to post photos.

> verification process...as well as the captcha...has slowed the spammage I agree with Mr. Pid's assessment. The type of spam I see here doesn't seem to be bot-posted. A person has to set up an account and then deal with the captcha; you can spam dead.net, but it's a very labor intensive process for a rather narrow niche. > a more stringent sign up and user verification process [to] deter these dope wads Such barriers to entry would also make it much more difficult for the non-spammers, which likely far outnumber the dope wads, as you call them, wilfredtjones. My suggestion would be to add a "Report Spam" button to each post, like on craigslist, which wouldn't reduce the number of spam posts, but which would make them easier for marye to find and eradicate.