Yesterday, around 4:45pm PDT, UserVoice experienced an unexpected data issue. The result was that the Dashboard view in the Admin Console was temporarily unavailalbe, and ticket delivery was delayed. No data was lost. Our team worked quickly to get you access to your Admin Console by disabling the Dashboard, and we got everything running smoothly by 5:35pm. Your end-users would not have experienced anything out of the ordinary.

We do our best to learn from unexpected issues, but often they are one-off issues that won't ever occur again. Our team worked quickly to get you access to your account, and we'll continue to do that any time we have any issues. Thanks for your patience during this hiccup!

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVocie

We've resolved two issues this morning that we wanted to make you aware of.

Over the weekend, our search feature stopped including new posts in the results. This was due to part of our system failing to initiate. Unfortunately, we weren't monitoring this specific part. We have started monitoring it now, so we should be able to avoid this in the future.

There was also a bug for a small number of accounts that had foreign characters in their embedded tabs. When we moved to Ruby 1.9, these characters were damaged. We feel terrible that we made you look bad by having a tab on your site with errors on it, and we'll be implementing a deeper QA of our products the next time we migrate Ruby versions (which hopefully won't be for a long time).

Please let us know if you have any questions or remaining issues.

Apologies,

Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

On Monday, in the process of upgrading our version of Rails, we broke the UserVoice Facebook app. Customers visiting the app on your Facebook page would have found that clicking buttons didn't result in anything. We fixed this issue yesterday for most users at 9a PDT. Please note that we're still resolving an issue with the app affecting Internet Explorer 8 users.

Rails upgrades don't happen very often, but obviously when they do we strive to avoid any issues for you. This upgrade did not result in any downtime of the main UserVoice platform, and any resulting bugs were fixed relatively quickly. Unfortunately, Facebook apps are a fickle thing and we've had our share of problems with it, regardless of Rails.

The good news is that Facebook's new app paradaigm is much more stable, and we'll be revamping the UserVoice Facebook App to fit these new guidelines in the next few months. At that point, you can expect an app with far fewer problems.

Thanks for your patience and understanding, and please let us know if you have any questions regarding this incident.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Early this morning a bug occurred which prevented Admins from adding other Admins to their account, and from inviting users to private forums. When trying to accomplish these actions, you would have seen greyed-out fields preventing you from entering text. These issues were fixed after about 3 hours, once our team spotted them. Everything should be working fine now!

Please do let us know if you're still experiencing any issues.

Have a great weekend,

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Sometimes, Santa brings us coal.

On Saturday something broke down between us and the services we use to send emails. The result was that 3000 emails from Saturday - across a number of UserVoice accounts - weren’t delivered until Monday.

We’re not sure yet where in the chain things broke down, but it’s clear that we need notifications when something happens with the services we’re using for email delivery. The team will be working on that this week, and keeping a close eye (manually) on the email queue.

Having support tickets not get delivered can be a terrible experience for your customers, and we are constantly working to lower the chances that this will happen. This weekend was unfortunate. While we can’t go back in time and send those emails on time, we would like to offer you 25% off your next month of UserVoice as an apology. Use the coupon code xmasdelay to redeem this discount (instructions here).

Thanks for knowing that we will continue to make things better. If you still feel that you're experiencing issues, don't hesitate to contact us.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Today we resolved an issue wherein users who had not previously interacted with the UserVoice Facebook App could not interact with it. Basically, they’d try to do something on the Facebook App and it wouldn’t react.

This issue was introduced last week when Facebook removed a specific parameter in their app language. Unfortunately we were unaware of this change. Even more unfortunately, instead of gently deprecating it with an error message, they just removed it...resulting in a number of broken apps like ours.

It’s our responsibility to be aware of changes on any platform we use, and this week our development team will be discussing how to make this happen. We apologize for dropping the ball on this front, and we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Everything should be functioning properly with the app at this point - please let us know if you have any questions or see any further issues.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

In March we launched UserVoice Helpdesk, and with it a new front-end interface for UserVoice. You’ve probably seen it - our account uses it, as well as every new signup since March.

This morning we’ve moved most accounts over to this new interface. We’ll be working with some of the more fragile accounts - those with custom design or legacy features - throughout the next 60 days. We’re excited to provide you with a more flexible, powerful interface, and we hope you’re excited too.

While you won’t see a ton of new functionality on the surface, we’ve made major changes to the stuff under the hood:

• Written in HTML5
• Easier to theme
• Fits accessibility standards
• Responsive layout, so it works better on mobile devices

Most importantly, this new structure will allow us to iterate faster, bringing you better things in less time.

I know this will be frustrating for some folks. I’ve been there...I’m sure I’ve tweeted more than a few times about how irritated I was with new interfaces. But this new structure will truly allow us to move faster in making UserVoice better and better for you. We’ve spent the last few months polishing and improving this interface. Is it perfect? Definitely not. We will absolutely be listening to your feedback and issues over the coming days, weeks, and months and improving the interface.

If you have any questions, concerns, issues, or anything, please leave a comment or contact us - we’re standing by to help out.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

This morning we deployed some code that introduced the following issues for some accounts:

• Ideas would not load in the Admin Console
• Some idea pages on the front-end generated error pages
• Status updates would not working

These issues were present from around 8:45am to 9:30am PDT before we reverted the bad code. No data was lost, and there should be no further issues.

This was 100% our fault. Our team is growing, but our training processes haven't caught up. This code should never have been deployed, but the processes around deploying code had not been fully communicated. We'll be re-evaluating our training and ensuring that all new hires are familiar with our practices going forward. We're very sorry that you had to suffer due to these oversights.

Please let us know if you continue to see any issues.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Early this morning (around 3am PDT) emails stopped arriving in Helpdesk ticket systems. It took us a few hours of work (and a lot of coffee), but everything is has been successfully delivered at this point, and there is no longer any delay. No content was lost. You may also have seen some related slowness in the Admin Console, which should also be resolved.

Apologies for the belated notice - we were evaluating what was going on and trying to patch things up, as well as dealing with the press from this morning. That's not a good excuse. Next time, we need to inform you sooner, and we will do so.

If you are still seeing any issues or have any questions, feel free to contact us.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Last night, in the process of deploying some of the back end for the upcoming custom statuses feature, we introduced an issue that slowed down the UserVoice service (back and front ends) for about an hour. There were two 5-minute periods where our services were unusable, but other than that the only experience would have been slow reaction from the UI. No data was lost.

As soon as we introduced this issue we quickly worked to patch it up, and everything is working now. We extend our apologies for this incident, and hope that we didn't affect too many people as this was a typically low-traffic part of the week.

If you're still having issues or have any questions, let us know.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice