UPDATE: The application and site should be working correctly now.

---

We’ve encountered a slew of problems during our upgrade to a database cluster today. We are still working extremely hard with our web host to get the problems sorted out as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Graboid is growing, and growing fast.

We apologize to our loyal users for the downtime we’ve all been experiencing. The good news is that Wednesday, November 28, we will be undertaking MAJOR server upgrades. Please be patient as the site and service (and even e-mail support) will likely be interrupted throughout the morning. We are trying to complete all of the upgrades during our least busy time, 4AM to 10AM EST, and we will switch the site over to a static progress page to keep all of you informed of the status of the upgrades. You will be able to access this status page by visiting www.graboid.com.

We thank you for your patience and understanding, and look forward to offering you improved reliability.

If you’re trying to get an answer on a specific Graboid problem or feature, don’t expect to post on the blog and necessarily get a moderator response with an answer. Since we monitor the blog regularly, we’ll sometimes post an answer to a simple question, but in general, that’s what customer support is for.

If you’re a user and you see someone post a question and you have an answer, by all means, help us out and post a reply.

We had some database server issues this afternoon. The application is now back up and running as of 4pm - if you had XML errors or were unable to sign in to the application, it was being caused by server downtime on our end.

After the fantastic level of response to the our last blog post, I thought we could use some feedback regarding our site. By “site” I mean our web site, and not our application which you use to download your masses of video content.

Your participation in our little poll would be extremely helpful, but even better would be posting your thoughts in our comments section — so don’t be shy!

[poll=2]

As we decide how prominent to make the search function in the new version, we have to wonder how much browsing our users are doing, vs typing in the name of a show you want to watch and then scrolling through episodes. How much sorting, how much re-sorting, that sort of thing. Basically, we’re wondering what your typical visit with Graboid Video might be like.

I’ll typically do one of 3 things - do random searches on things I might like, say, movies from the 70’s - search ‘(197′ ; search for a specific title of a favorite movie or tv show; or just scroll through the latest postings, usually in the adult category where the concept of ‘favorite’ has less meaning. I’ve never clicked on the genre dropdowns, only the main categories.

Every once in a while I wish I could sort by language. And I wish there were more titles with green thumbs beside them. That makes the process of selecting one of several posts much much easier.

If we get input from you on your behavior, it will help us refine the interface, now and in future updates.

If you haven’t already noticed, we’ve put up some ads on our home page. More of a test than anything, since the potential revenue is tiny relative to our overall business. The question we’re asking ourselves is what does it do to our brand? People have commented that they like the nice clean look of the Graboid site, and it’s nice to not see all the ad clutter so many other sites have. But if it doesn’t really make a difference, then we’ll leave the ads up, add some twinkling stars, and hope nobody notices (but clicks anyway).

We’d love to hear what you think.

Just to add to Ryan’s comment about the files being updated now, we promise to be completely upfront with all technical (or other) problems if they develop - as we always have been.

Thanks for using Graboid TV!

Sorry for the delay with the addition of new content. Over 1,600 new videos have been added to Graboid today. There was a glitch with one of the servers that was causing it not to process the new videos, but it has since been resolved and all of that content has now magically appeared for your consumption.

So, to allay your fears, no — the database glitch was not “the beginning of the end” for Graboid. We’re still going — and going stronger than ever. We’re in the midst of a major upgrade to our server setup which will help lessen and hopefully eliminate the occurrence of these database problems.

Thanks to all of you who let us know about the problem.

There have been a few comments about no new files today. File updates are usually done daily, however, we have no control over the content, or the servers they reside on. Every once in a while a day does get skipped - you should see newer material soon.