Inside LabourStart

The Janos campaign has been closed after more than 3 months.  This has been one of our smaller campaigns, with a total in five languages of under 1,000 messages sent.  We’ve been told by the UE, which asked us to launch the campaign in August, to suspend the campaign and have been thanked by the union in Mexico.  “Unfortunately, there is nothing to report publicly at this point,” we’ve been told.

After trialling this blog for a few weeks among the senior correspondents, we’re today inviting all LabourStart correspondents to come for a visit.  Feel free to bookmark this blog (or add it to your favorites) and check it regularly.  Add comments if you’d like.

Please do keep in mind that this is an internal blog for the use of LabourStart’s correspondents and is not aimed at the broader public (though it is not password-protected or anything like that).

Here’s what Google Analytics has to say about the last month for LabourStart:

• 75,349 unique visitors
• 159,750 visits
• 244,274 page views

Most popular language home pages:

1. English – 160,368
2. Norwegian – 6,228
3. Finnish – 2,590
4. French – 916
5. Dutch – 798
6. Russian – 729
7. Chinese – 429
8. Indonesian – 375
9. Spanish – 338
10. Polish – 307
11. Swedish – 156
12. German – 104
13. Italian – 102
14. Turkish – 95
15. Esperanto – 91
16. Arabic – 86
17. Farsi – 62
18. Hebrew – 53
19. Danish – 46
20. Greek – 40
21. Portuguese – 32
22. Creole – 31
23. Bulgarian – 13

We now have a Greek version — no content yet, but we should have the first stories up today.  All thanks to our new correspondent there, Nikos Lountos.

Here’s what we just now received:

I understand that you’ve been upset with our technical support team. This is something that I can only apologize for. This is an aspect of our service that we’re always trying to improve. This is why your feedback is so important to us. We can now look through and see where and if we made mistakes. Then, we can look into making sure that this doesn’t happen again. Again, we can only apologize for this frustration that you’ve suffered. We will continue to work on this to serve you better. I show that the site is currently up and functioning. As a sign of good faith I have since added three months free hosting to your account.

The International Metalworkers Federation is asking us to launch an online campaign in support of the ITUA in Russia – we’re waiting for details but are likely to go live this week.

Our readers have come up with a list for us — here are some of the suggestions.  If any of you could take a look and pass on your opinions (use the comments here) it would be appreciated.

• LeftSpace Very appealing, UK-based with a focus on trade unions.  They’ve contacted us and were recommended by another reader as well.
• Memset Recommended by Nick Holden; our mailing lists are hosted there now.
• Electric Embers Appealing, San-Francisco based worker coop.
• Nearlyfreespeech.net Recommended by a progressive US web activist and one of our supporters.
• Lunarpages.com Recommended by a Canadian union webmaster.
• Meccahosting Recommended by one of our readers in the U.K.
• Laughing Squid Recommended by a reader in the US
• 1&1 Recommended by an IWW webmaster in the US and a trade union one here in the U.K.  Obviously people have had different experiences with this company – but ours sucked.
• Flexihostings An Australian hosting company recommended by a comrade in New Zealand
• The Phone Co-op A UK company – I think this evolved from Poptel.

I may add more names to this list as other recommendations come in.  Stay tuned.  Add comments below.

This was the explanation we received from 1&1 Internet:

The website is in fact hosted on an auxiliary server which is designed to withstand a higher load, although it was still not able to handle the load your site generated.   I assume the increased traffic from the campaign generated a larger load then what our standard web hosting servers could handle.

As a result, for something like 34 hours, our website was essentially offline.

What next?

I’ve been discussing with Nick Holden the idea of moving our site to a virtual server hosted by a company called Memset which has a very good reputation.  The main thing we need now is improved service — it should not have taken six telephone calls, countless emails, and 34 hours to solve this problem.

Nor should 1&1 have taken us offline without first consulting us.

Moving servers should involve basically three steps:

• Moving all the files over — ideally first zipping them, and then unzipping them on the new site to preserve directory structure and permissions.
• Moving over the MySQL databases (there are now five).
• Moving over the domain names (and sub-domains).

I’ve offered to employ Nick to do this for us and to act as tech support.  He uses Memset to host his various sites, so he knows them well.  Our mailing lists are hosted on one of their servers.

As LabourStart has grown — and grown more important — we really can’t afford to use a low-cost service like 1&1 which is simply too bureaucratic and too anonymous for us when we have a crisis.

Please don’t hesitate to post your comments, questions and suggestions.

As you may know, many people are getting error messages when trying to send off messages to Iran.

In the most recent quarter-hour period, I see that just under 100 messages were successfully sent off — so at the rate of 400 messages per hour, this is probably our biggest campaign ever.

There are many things going on here that can be slowing things down, so here are the steps I’ve taken to speed things up:

• When sending off a message, it no longer writes to our old flat ASCII database.  This was certainly slowing things down and I believe this is no longer necessary now that we have a much faster MySQL database.
• When displaying a campaign, we no longer show how many people have signed up (in real time) – but this will be restored later.

I’ve gotten a number of messages from people complaining – here is what I’ve replied to each one:

Thanks for writing – it appears that a very large number of people trying to access the page at the same time is causing this problem.  Please try again later.  Thanks for your patience.

Here’s 15 minutes of highlights