Status as of Monday, May 29, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! Here's today's status:

• Chris completed all of the hardware upgrades that required his presence at the datacenter successfully last night. The servers are all in their places and we'll be returning to State College today.
• Once there, now that the hardware is done, Chris's first task is to investigate and resolve all outstanding customer service inquiries. After that, we plan to spend three weeks on three key areas to improve the business before evaluating SHA-256 mining.
• First, we will evaluate and implement minor changes to the website and trader to reduce the number of customer service requests. One of the reasons that we are having trouble moving forward, even to improve stability, is because Chris is having trouble getting out from under customer service requests. Interestingly, in the past we found that minor changes can make a huge difference in this area. For example, changing the text "payout on [date]" to "payout when threshold is met" on the website significantly reduced the number of E-Mails Chris receives about payout questions. Our first priority will be to identify ways that we can modify the website or other parts of the code that will both make the customer experience better and also allow Chris to move forward with other tasks.
• Second, we plan to automate some maintenance tasks that Chris is performing now. Two weeks ago, I wrote a program to withdrawal money from an exchange to a wallet that will run on the command line without a password. This sounds simple, but it can take over fifteen minutes just to log in, enter the two factor authentication code, figure out how much is in the exchange, click "withdrawal," compute the fee, enter the password and two factor authentication code again, wait for the confirmation E-Mail, click on the confirmation E-Mail, and type in the query to update the database. As we get more of these implemented, more of Chris's time will be freed up to move forward.
• Third, I plan to focus on the reliability and performance of the system. We already have three major improvements ready to go but haven't had time to release them because of the first two issues. One of these improvements is the elimination of the open database transactions during payouts, which will stop shares from getting behind, the second is more CPU usage optimizations that will reduce stale shares, and the third is moving the mining server to the new hardware, which will provide more CPU power. Since each of these releases is very risky, we will probably do them independently over the next weeks.
• I apologize to FRISKIE, who made many posts in the chat, for not replying to him directly, but hopefully he will be assured by the above that we are working on his problems. We want to focus on geting on the road now so we can get back home and once everything is set up again, Chris will be investigating everyone's issues.

[FRISKIE]

Hi Steve - the explanations are certainly appreciated, and having worked in the IT Hosting services industry for some years I can empathize with the complications you've described.

Your planning is sound, and clearly goal oriented - I'm personally reassured by the roadmap and realize it will be worth the pain.

That said, I can also see that we're in for a few more wild rides, and appreciate the time you've taken to explain the coming changes and associated risk, will buckle up and prepare

Final quick question - if service requests are such a distraction from the upgrade and optimization work, why not take on a customer service specialist to at least triage and categorize the requests, perhaps handling the low priority ones themselves and passing on to Chris the ones that truly require his attention - but with pre-prioritization so he can devote his attention more efficiently?

Obviously it adds an operating expense but the gains could be worth it.

Cheers Steve, and kudos to Chris for some fantastic work.

FRISKIE

[dfair98]

Final quick question - if service requests are such a distraction from the upgrade and optimization work, why not take on a customer service specialist to at least triage and categorize the requests, perhaps handling the low priority ones themselves and passing on to Chris the ones that truly require his attention - but with pre-prioritization so he can devote his attention more efficiently?

Obviously it adds an operating expense but the gains could be worth it.

I agree.. I am sure you could find an intern from Penn state or South Hills School of Business & Technology

[GregoryGHarding]

set me up with a prohashing email. il take care of the mundane service requests and pass on the specific ones.

[Steve Sokolowski]

set me up with a prohashing email. il take care of the mundane service requests and pass on the specific ones.

Thanks for the offer, and we might take you up on this sometime soon. Right now, though, I'm not convinced that your assistance will actually solve the issue.

After a review of the 49 tickets last night, Chris determined that many of them were from customers who were reporting issues with the mining server that are either fixed in the next release, or which wouldn't need to be addressed if we could determine their cause.

As before, it seems like it comes back to software issues. These issues can best be resolved by improving the software, rather than by putting more people on the customer service team.

[GregoryGHarding]

sounds good. the offer will remain open