GrandWizard wrote:You Gentlemen misunderstand, or maybe I'm not clear. Prior to thottling, zone followers constituted 99% of alert traffic and took down our servers multiple times. That is why we had to take down the service altogther until a solution was found. Throttling at first made things managable (50% or so) but quickly rose again as subscribers rose. People were still making every zone a zone follower even though they were told not to. We had to limit zone followers to one zone at that time.
My point is that when we signed up and paid for the service we were allowed multiple zones, and then you apparently changed the policy to 1 which I wasn't even aware of because I continued to have support for more than 1 which is what I had signed up for and paid for in the beginning.
GrandWizard wrote:As for notifying people of a change, we weren't aware that any subscribers had more than one zone followed. We can't drill that deep into customer reports to see that.
That seems to be another problem in itself if you can't tell what customers have which features so that modifying things breaks stuff you aren't even aware of for customers.
GrandWizard wrote:As far as we can tell only a handful of customers had access to multiple zone followers and I'm sorry you had this all this time but we cannot allow some customers to have access multiple zone followers when everyone else can't. This is akin to people getting free cable for years and then having the service cut off.
No, actually it is akin to people signing up to get 50 channels of cable and then having the policy changed to 1 channel because their infrastructure couldn't handle the success/load but those customers continuing to get the 50 channels that they originally signed up for, then having service cut off out of the blue and wondering what happened since they had signed up for 50 channels in the first place. It is not like we signed up for 1 channel and then sudden got 50 for free, I signed up to be able to have multiple zone followers which I was given when I paid for service only to have it taken away later even though I had already paid.
GrandWizard wrote:I will forward a request to look at whether more than one zone can be allowed but as I said, there hasn't been a single request to add more than one zone follower other forum users on this thread.
That would be most appreciated. I don't need access to 50 zones, but more than 1 would be very useful. Even if it was limited to 5. Further restrictions could be placed on people's zone follower queue for basic accounts if people are worried about traffic such as no more than 10 alerts for all zones combined per hour, or a max # messages per day, or something like that. For people who try to abuse the system will be limited, and for those of us who find it very useful and have periodic events don't need to be punished. Or heck, even having 1 by default but then you can click a button to enable more but you have to agree to terms saying if you generate too much traffic you will be pushed back down to a max of 1 or something to stop the abusers.
GrandWizard wrote:If you want to log all your zone traffic then I recommend you use the built-in TPI and log it on your local computer.
It is not logging that I'm interested in, it is more alerting when specific zones trip. I don't have all my zones enabled, but I do have more than 1 that I follow. And the traffic at my location is very low, most zones rarely trip but when they do it is important that I'm notified.
Jeff.