Tuesday, August 10, 2010

HASA How-tos - August 2010

Every site will experience technical problems and downtime, and alas! HASA is no exception... Read on to find out how to report any problems you may run into.

How do I...
...report a site problem or outage?


For readers, problems with the site that are caused by technical problems fall into two broad categories: either you find you cannot reach one or more specific pages, or the whole site is inaccessible. Below, you can find what you as a reader can do in each situation.

First to remember: if we don’t know about it, it can’t be fixed!

So please, if you experience any of the following errors:
-A white page with a few characters
-An error message that has lots of technical code
notify Tech Support. It may be just a glitch, but it may also be something that we need to know about so it can be found and (hopefully) fixed.

When the site is unreachable and you can't see anything like a normal HASA page, that usually means there is something wrong on the server. That affects everyone, so it's better to be safe than sorry and just send in a warning that something significant seems wrong on the site. If you're not sure how big the problem is, try going to a few other places on the site. If you can browse the site normally except for one page or one form, then there probably is a smaller problem. You should still report it so that small problems don't become larger ones!

No matter how big or small the problem, if you get an error message of some kind, please either copy the text or make a screenshot of the page (Ctrl-Prt Scr) and send those along when you send in a report to Tech Support.

You can't go wrong sending in a message that something isn't quite right. To be able to do that, you can make note of the Tech Support email address. Also be sure to bookmark the HASA LJ, the HASA News Yahoo Group, or our Blogspot blog. If we already know about a longer outage, those are the places we will use to post about it. You can also post a message or leave a comment at any of those locations if you can't remember the email address for Tech Support.

HASA has visitors around the clock. Chances are someone will see a site error before Anglachel does. Don't be shy about sending an email that something may be misbehaving.

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