Maintenance complete — all is well

The engineering gnomes successfully performed the database maintenance this morning.  All is back to normal.

For those among you that share this author’s sleep-deprived, caffeine addicted and woefully under appreciated engineering career path here is what we did today.

Brring’s systems started life based on a popular content management system.  After a few months of development we realized that it was not a good fit for the website we were building so we ditched it.  However, since we had a fair amount of data already loaded into the database we decided to keep it as-is and drop the unnecessary stuff later.  Well, it’s later.

Today we dropped a slew of unused tables from our production database.  We, of course, performed a good deal of testing on our development system before rolling this out.  The good news is that we now have a lean, mean, database schema (yes, I realize that does not rhyme) that has about 1/2 the number of tables of the original.

Nice.

Planned Service Outage - July 2 @ 9AM Eastern

The gnomes have some necessary database maintenence to perform and 9AM Eastern is one of our quietest hours.

The service will be down for only a few minutes.  During this time no calls will go through to your private numbers and the website will be unavailable.

Paid Member Rewards pass $10,000

The headline says it all.  Brring has paid out over $10,000 in rewards to it’s members.

Yes, we know we aren’t processing request as quickly as you, or we, believe they should be processed.  At present we are trying to find a bank that will accept an automated feed of payments to be made.  Until then we’ll continue entering them by hand.  <sigh>

Redemption Status page issue

We are aware of the problem with the redemption status page.  Our valiant sleep-deprived-but-highly-caffeinated engineering crew are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.  This has no impact on your rewards or redemption requests.

Keep an eye on this space for an update when the issue is resolved.

Big Changes at Brring!

Those of you that are members of Brring have already seen this but we wanted to share it with the community as a whole. I want to emphasis a few points before jumping into the annoucement:

• Everyone will be paid for any previously legitimately earned rewards. Let me say this again — ALL LEGITIMATELY EARNED REWARDS WILL BE PAID. Yes, we recognize that it is taking much longer than we would like, and longer than we promised but the simple mechanics of mailing hundreds of $10/$20 checks has turned out to be more daunting than originally planned.
• We are adding significant new ringback tone functionality. Two of the new features are the ability to assign unique ringback tones to specific callers and to edit your uploaded ringbacks so that you can chose what portion of the file is heard by your callers.
• Facebook integration. We have developed a Facebook application that will allow Facebook members to call Brring subscribers without having to dial! It also allows Brring members to access their Brring account information directly from Facebook.

We have learned, and continue to learn, a great deal about you want from the Brring service and for that we are grateful. We’ve also learned that some of our economic models needed refinement to keep Brring a healthy company. These changes are a direct result of what we have learned so far.

Please continue to let us know how we can improve the Brring experience for you! So without further ado…

We want Brring users to be the first to hear about new enhancements and changes to the Brring service.

Effective July 1, 2008, we will introduce three new changes.

1. New Ringback Functionality
2. Brring Facebook Application
3. Modified Rewards Policy

New Ringback Functionality

Brring will allow you to use multiple ringback files, instead of just one, and chose different ringbacks for different callers. We will make it easier for you to manage and rate your favorites. Brring will also allow you to upload ringbacks you create and share them with other users!

Brring Facebook Application

The Brring Facebook Application (download here; requires Facebook account) brrings all the functionality of Brring.com into Facebook. Even better, it allows friends to call you right from your Facebook page! Your Brring number does not appear on the page — callers connect with a click of a button. Try it out!

New Rewards Policy

The key change in our reward policy is the elimination of call based rewards. These are the rewards that accrue each time someone calls your Brring number. Standard rewards have been $0.05 per call, with initial call rewards $1.00. We will continue to reward users who invite friends to use Brring and those who help target ads by profiling friends. Those rewards remain unchanged.

Unfortunately during our beta test we have experienced an inordinate number of people flooding the system with fraudulent calls (numbers posted on Craig’s List under false pretexts, setting up multiple accounts, etc.). By eliminating the incentive to do so, we will improve the service for everyone.

We will pay all legitimate call-based rewards, including initial call rewards, earned through June 15, 2008. You do not have to redeem rewards by this date, only earn them. Finally, we will be introducing easier ways to redeem rewards more quickly. Stay tuned for further announcements.

Thank You

Thank you for using Brring during our beta test. We appreciate your patience during our growing pains. Most importantly, thank you for helping us realize what works and doesn’t work, and for helping us shape and improve the service.

Sincerely,

Brring, Inc.

Unscheduled maintenance

Looks like no holiday for the Brring engineering team…

We’re in the process of doing some necessary, but unscheduled work on our database. You may experience some intermittent problems with the website and Brring calls for the next few minutes.

Sorry about this folks.

UPDATE: This was resolved last night about 10 minutes after I posted this. I also posted an update which apparently didn’t make it to the live site. To quote Marvin the Martian… Oh drat these computers, they’re so naughty and so complex. I could *pinch* them.

Payment status

For those of you that are curious about our payment processing here are some basic stats:

- Redemption requests paid: 456

- Total rewards paid to date:  almost $9,000.00

Our thanks to you who are patiently waiting in queue for redemption request processing.

Problem with Telco resolved

We had an issue with one of our telco providers that blocked incoming calls.  This caused a large number of Brring numbers to constantly ring ‘busy’.

We have resolved the issue and calls are going through normally.  If your Brring number is still not working please drop an email to Customer Support.

Unplanned outage - restored

We had a small problem with our database today that caused the site to be unavailable for a time. The issue has been resolved and the site is working normally.  There was no impact to call handling; all calls were processed normally.

Sorry for the interruption.

Short outage today

We had a short unplanned outage today at about 4PM Eastern time.  This was due to an issue with our telco provider and was resolved within 20 minutes.  During this outage callers to your Brring! number may have received a busy signal or simply silence.

We apologize to those of you that may have missed calls as a result of this outage.