more fun with Fun Publicatons/the Fan Club

[Dominic]

Lewis was kind enough to order a Runamuck for me along with a few things for Zab. After about an hour of fighting with the Fan Club's page, which apparently still cannot handle the wholly predictable traffic it draws, he got a confirmation for his orders.

Later, he got an email from the Fan Club apologizing for the inconveniences earlier in the day, including at least one crash. The email went on to explain that the Fan Club's page, or at least the portions devoted to buying/selling, would be going down while they changed their servers.

Yes, you read that right. Fun Publications decided to change their servers *after* opening up sales on items that people had been waiting for. On principle, I kind of regret ordering that Battle Charger now.....


Dom
-can at least respect the Fan Club being so commercially successful despite being bad at just about every aspect of being an official Fan Club.

[Onslaught Six]

It's kind of understandable. This shit happens. It's expected that people will underestimate server flow because, reasonably, these things just 'happen.' They happen all the time, to all sorts of companies. Because you're not going to pay tons of money on a server that can handle 30 times the traffic you get on a regular Wednesday. You're gonna pay for the server that can handle Wednesday every week, and that's it.

I mean, FunPub doesn't have shitloads of money (somehow??) so they probably take a hit every time this happens and they upgrade to a bigger server. And then they always hype the shit out of these events and don't have a decent system of throttling the userbase. If there were a way to preorder these things in advance, months at a time, things would be easier. But then, once the preorder went up, everybody would jump on that, too, so I don't know.

[Dominic]

Fun Publications has shown consistent ineptitude when it comes to managing and securing their internet presence. How long did it take them to set up on-line registration? They consistently have server problems at the times when they are expecting people to be giving them money. (The server should be set up for the busiest times because that is when the most money is coming in to the company.) Security?

The only reason I manage to get as many Club/Con figures as I do is that I have a friend who orders from them any way.


Dom

[Tigermegatron]

It's kind of understandable. This shit happens. It's expected that people will underestimate server flow because, reasonably, these things just 'happen.' They happen all the time, to all sorts of companies. Because you're not going to pay tons of money on a server that can handle 30 times the traffic you get on a regular Wednesday. You're gonna pay for the server that can handle Wednesday every week, and that's it.

I mean, FunPub doesn't have shitloads of money (somehow??) so they probably take a hit every time this happens and they upgrade to a bigger server. And then they always hype the shit out of these events and don't have a decent system of throttling the userbase. If there were a way to preorder these things in advance, months at a time, things would be easier. But then, once the preorder went up, everybody would jump on that, too, so I don't know.

Some internet TF fans mentioned elsewhere the main TFCC problem:
1- they have over 10,000 paid TFCC members & not enough exclusives made for all members. the club toys are only made in under 3,000 volume units for each character toy.

[Onslaught Six]

That's the thing, though, you gotta think about supply and demand. There are those of us who will only rarely buy an exclusive from them--in all the years it's been in existence, I've only bought the bullet on two of the exclusives; Botcon excepted. (I did end up with Dom's Clench and Pyro.)