In the event that you’ve hit a missing page or are trying to post a message while Plurk is doing maintenance behind the scenes, chances are you’ve seen the A-Team screen. It’s got the lovable crew from the hit 80s TV show and includes a short message to tide users over.
“Plurk is currently unavailable. We are working on bringing the site up again. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
On Friday, many Plurkers were introduced to a new side of Plurk and a new fail screen. It had been announced that Plurk was going down for a short period of time while the A-Team performed some routine maintenance. Nobody thought anything of it.
Users were greeted by a message similar to the one from before, but this new fail screen also included the lovable Plurk monsters and a short poem.
We are the world
We are Plurk creatures
We are the ones who make a brighter day
For all the hoomans…
Once again, Plurk’s quirky sense of humor kept users entertained and at bay while the site was down. Everyone got a kick out of the new screen and had a good laugh.
Then an hour passed.
Plurk still wasn’t back up.
Had something gone wrong? Another hour passed. Users began to worry. Some flocked over to Twitter and started adding Plurk friends, tweeting about what was going on.
With no response from Plurk or the A-Team, many were left wondering what would become of Plurk. Then, finally, 13 hours later, Plurk finally came back online.
Much to everyone’s comfort, Amix appeared in front of the Plurkosphere on the official Plurk blog and apologized to everyone for the extended period of downtime.
What he was able to share, and ultimately what Plurk benefited from, was described as follows:
- The goal of this update was to prepare ourselves for rapid feature deployments without the need to take the site offline to complete them.
- We introduced a new tabbed filtering view for the timeline which allows you to better filter out your plurks into: all plurks, just your plurks, and now, just private plurks.
- The update allows us to slice and dice your timeline in more interesting ways and offer you additional filtering options down the road (think ‘Plurks Responded To’ and ‘Favorited Plurks’).
- We purged a lot of the gunk in Plurk’s arteries and gave it some Aspirin and now it should be livelier and more responsive than ever.
So, even though Plurk was down for the better part of a day, the community seems to be better off because of it. As Amix described, the updates that were made should allow for seamless maintenance in the future and less interuptions for the users, something that should be appreciated by all.
What did you do while Plurk was down? Did you revert back to Twitter, much like most of us moved to Plurk when Twitter was down? Did you have second thoughts about this microblogging startup?
