More Bloglines issues

According to an announcement on the Bloglines News page, one of their crawler machines crashed yesterday, causing an outage that lasted until very late in the day. They say everything should be fixed by now.

But what’s really curious is that two announcements have been scrubbed from the News page. One was the August 9 notice that read, in full:

Bloglines Update

Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue — we’ve simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn’t put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.

That notice appeared after I criticized Bloglines in a series of posts and exchanged some e-mail messages and comment threads with a Bloglines spokesperson. It was there yesterday, when I pointed out that Russell Beattie had noticed problems at Bloglines as well.

In yesterday’s post, I asked Bloglines to post an update on the status of the server move. And today the August 9 announcement is gone. Down the memory hole.

I have an e-mail in to another contact at Ask Jeeves, the new parent company of Bloglines, requesting an explanation. I’ll pass along their response.

Update: The Ask Jeeves flack who got back to me says “the announcement was removed accidentily and we are still in the process of the move.”

What? This so-called server relocation has now taken a full month, with no end in site. This is bullshit. Here’s my follow-up e-mail to the Bloglines spokesperson:

Thanks for the update. I’ve asked this question several times and can’t understand why no one has answered it yet. Maybe you can help.

When is the server move scheduled to be completed? I have honestly never heard of a move of this sort that takes more than a week, much less drag on for a month.

Your very large and very loyal customer base has a right to ask that question, don’t you think?

I look forward to your reply.

But I certainly won’t be holding my breath. My most recent post has been up on my site for more than five hours, but my 359 subscribers who use Bloglines still haven’t seen it. That’s pitiful. Mark Fletcher, maybe you need to make a few phone calls and find out what your people are actually doing. They seem to have taken the summer off.