Modwest Blog

A Day in the Modwest Life: Janiel

We had numerous requests earlier this summer for additions to our "Day in the Modwest Life" series, so here's one more. This a day in mid-July lived by Janiel, Modwest's Business Manager.

7:00 AM Visiting father in-law up and moving around so I’m up too. Make coffee & morning chit chat.

7:20AM Get in shower – water’s not very hot, hmm...

7:45 AM Go downstairs to check on water heater. Pilot light is out. Not good. Relight pilot and go up stairs for more chit chat – mother in-law is now up too. Wake up husband so he can chit chat and I can get ready for work.

8:20 AM Off to work. It’s about a 15 mile commute and traffic is light. The drive on Hwy 93 is lovely so when traffic isn’t a bear, and I enjoy the ride.

8:50 AM Park my car in the lot off Orange St. & Front and walk the river path to the office. It’s raining so the smell is absolutely wonderful. Very fresh & green, can smell the river, flowers, trees & grass. No better place to live!

8:56 AM Greet Marianne, and settle in to answer billing voice messages & emails. Emails & calls are pretty light considering I took a 3 day weekend.

9:32 AM On my way to get cup of coffee, I remember to remind a new employee that I need their health insurance enrollment forms.

10:00 AM We are doing a series of in-house workshops & training. Last week I along with Customer Care Specialists & Web Developer were assigned homework (due tomorrow) on PHP 101. Now’s a good time to start.

11:15 AM John lets us know he wants anti-spyware software installed on all Windows machines.

12:02 PM I install Spybot and check for any unwanted programs/infections on my machine. As usual Vista doesn’t play nice & makes the new software jump through extra hoops to do its thing. Ugh. Scan requires closing browser and I need multiple browsers open to help customers with support issues.

12:40 PM Business as usual, M & H back on phones after their Spybot work. Now we’re all hungry.

12:45 PM My kitchen cupboard is looking pretty bare – gotta go shopping this week and replenish my stock. Have little chicken salad & peaches. Fix big glass of water; have to remember to drink lots of water today.

1:35 PM Scans all done, machine is clean. Answer a few new emails & then back to my PHP lesson.

2:50 PM Stuck on a particular PHP variable. Searching internet to find out what the error I’m seeing is all about.

3:05 PM Missing an ending “;” in my code – doh – all good now. It’s not very pretty though and I’m wasting too much time trying to make it look nicer.

3:10 PM Still on the same variable. Can’t make it do what I want. Confer with M and she doesn’t know how either. Put this variable on hold and move on to the next section. Will come back to this later.

3:30 PM Mail’s here. Sort through mail and begin posting payments to accounts. Receive large UPS shipment – new VPS hardware.

3:45 PM Received a payment for a customer that I can’t find. Search under everything I can think of (no domain listed, or invoice number, or email address, or phone number, nothing comes up when I search by address either.) About to send check back, when I find them by cross referencing the city & amount. Turns out the street name is the same on the account & check but not the street number.

4:30 PM Mail is done, answer a new email and back to php lesson. Almost completed my lesson.

5:00 PM Completed all of the lesson except that one pesky variable. Tinker with it some more. Could not figure out how to make it do what I wanted. Just in case you are interested I wanted to use variables to calculate my age – 17 years, by using $dob, $actualage & $fantasyage. Cheat and use variable $fantasyage = 29.

Send my assignment to teacher (Tom).

5:24PM I’m done. Hope I drank enough water. Fill my water bottle with electrolyte supplement and head to car.

5:40PM Arrive at yoga. First class I’ve been able to attend in almost 2 weeks, because of entertaining visiting in-laws. In-laws are off to dinner with friends so here I am.

5:55 PM Enter studio to preheat. Hotter then Hades. Notice they got new humidifiers.

7:30 PM Exit studio. DID NOT DRINK ENOUGH WATER! Sit with fellow yogis and eat my popcicle. Drink 16 oz vitamin water.

7:45 PM Back to my car and the drive home. Drink remainder of my 16 oz water bottle.

8:15 PM Greet husband & in-laws, off to shower – water not very hot, hmm...

8:30 PM Check water heater – pilot light out again. Looks like water heater is on the fritz. Let husband know. He re-lights.

8:34 PM Mother in-law brought home chicken Caesar salad for me (lovely woman). Eat on the sofa while I visit.

10:00 PM In-laws are heading home tomorrow (going back to Arizona via the west coast.) We discuss what time and agree they will not leave before 7 AM. Father in-law tends to rise early (4 AM) so this was an excellent compromise. Say good night as they head off to sleep.

10:15 PM Join husband to finish watching ‘Tomb Raider’ and relax, just the two of us. First time I’ve gotten to sit in my favorite chair in almost 2 weeks. Feels good.

11:00 PM Off to bed. – Wonder if I will have hot water tomorrow morning?

Afterword: Janiel's husband identified the problem with the water heater and replaced the broken part the next day. All is well.

Got other ideas for the Modwest Blog?  Let us know in the Modwest Community.

-JM

A Day in the Modwest Life: Tom

"A Day in the Life" is our most requested blog topic currently, so here's another installment. Featured today is Systems Engineer Tom.

Here's the play-by-play:

Uptime: 16:33, Calories burned: ~4500, Calories consumed: Not enough, Emergencies: 0,  Commuting close calls: 3

6:47 - Alarm, in form of local child-of-the-80s radio station, goes off.  I press snooze 1 time, giving four more minutes of sleep.  The song playing was the single from U2's Pop album, Discothèque. I'm tired because my wife, N, and I stayed up too late last night watching 30 Rock episodes on Netflix. 

6:52 - Feed cat who purposely knocked food off platform.  Yes, master... 

6:53 - Move clothes from washer to dryer -- all of my running clothes in there, sitting overnight.  They are 12% musty, so I'm using a new dryer sheet to compensate.  Being cheap, I tend to use fabric softener sheets 3 or 4 go-arounds.  Not this time. 

6:54 - Check on sick kitten that we are fostering from the Humane Society -- she's cloistered in bathroom, with no explosive bodily expulsions today.  Yes! 

7:07 - Slicking in edgy hair fixative product, realizing hair has become too long overnight to be effectively chunky punk. 

7:11 - Go out and feed chickens.  The sun is up and they know I'm coming out at about this time, so they stack themselves next to the door and topple out when I open it.

7:14 - Attempt to wake up N.  No dice. 

7:16 - Get breakfast cereal.  I eat breakfast every morning before work, so I can be focused.  That's not true; it's like a fad diet, where the only allowed food is cereal.  My teeth will probably pay the price one day, but the double-pour-and-eat-action sure is convenient.  The stay-fresh container, or as Mitch Hedberg said, the fresher, is down to the dregs.  So, my meal is all bran, no raisin.  It turned into brown Jell-O when exposed to milk.  Sproing. 

7:17 - I sleep extremely heavily, so I now check phone for alerts I slept through.  If I do this before getting ready, it sucks me in and the whole day is thrown off.  There were only two load beeps for one of our VPS servers -- not uncommon when dozens of containers are performing maintenance at the same time.

7:22 - Attempt to wake up N.  Another swing and a miss. 

7:23 - Feed fish.

7:23 - Check if new MySQL backup solution worked last night, catch up on email. 

7:30 - Stall a bit because I don't want to be early for my run with Marianne, co-worker and 50% of Team Modwest Half-Marathon. 

7:35 - Actually wake up N!  Feed the dog. 

7:38 - Borrow N's Body Bug.  I've been meaning to see what the device thinks of my metabolism and the run today seemed like it would make me look bad-ass.  Unverifiable numbers! 

7:45 - Start biking downtown to meet Marianne for run.  My commutes are always by bike.  I've logged over 6000 miles while working at Modwest the past 6 years, according to the Way to Go Club.  My commuter for the whole time has been a 2003 Diamondback Topanga Comp.

7:50 - Avoid crazy drivers;  they're apparently confused about the road construction and are occupied telling their phones all about it. 

7:55 - Stow bike in bike locker leased by Modwest and run to meeting place.  Good on them for fostering alternative transportation by providing secure storage. 

8:05 - Shouldn't have dawdled, arrived late.  Starting run. 

9:30 - Completed run, walking it off.  Here's the route. I am good going up hills, Marianne's good at downhill.  Descents shred my knees.  This is my last longish run before the Missoula Half-Marathon. 

9:40 - Marianne bought me a Powerade Ion-4 Advanced Electrolyte System (Sour Melon).  While being unnaturally radiant green, it was not sour.

10:12 - Answer Ops chat question about automount maps.  We're using autofs in a clever and troublesome way so we can have multiple environments in parallel. 

10:15 - Install TV antenna Janiel picked up for the office -- we've had a TV in the rumpus room since we moved in nine months ago, and it doesn't get any channels.  Blasphemy!  Turns out we only can easily get PBS through all the concrete of the Wilma. 

10:45 - Back at desk for "queue cleanup day", the day the Ops team does digital janitorial work and slays a few odd jobs -- But, checking support first. 

10:55 - Repaired John's broken drop database attempt; he was testing some recent problems people had on db0. 

11:00 - Got some music going -- Muse, then Infected Mushroom. 

11:45 - Cleanup queue mostly handled.  Moving on to little queue inversion projects.

11:52 - Stomach growling, Powerade not cutting it.  Cheese'n'crackers time.  Sharp. 

12:15 - Cage flag created for system tickets.  The Ops team has two ticket queues, one for time-sensitive requests, and another for long-term projects.  These frequently need kung-fu in the data center.  This flag ought to alleviate the question, "Do you guys need anything in the cage?" 

12:30 - Working on wrangling our log/temp/etc file management utilities so they're doing their job with our storage changes.  Even though disk space is cheap, I don't believe in being sloppy, so I've made this my pet project for the day. 

1:13 - Music ran out.  Midnight Juggernauts and Kasabian.

2:30 - Finished adjusting and documenting mw_cleanusertmp for now, ran it and freed 20GB+ of space. 

3:00 - Finished tuning and documenting mw-compressoldlogs for now, ran it and freed almost 30GB of space.

3:15 - The day-in-the-life epic saga typing continues, in terrible form. 

3:20 - Back on log rotation.  If only we could just use logrotate. 

4:00 - Got error_log truncation working on a new fileserver.  Freed nearly 20GB of space 

4:21 - Found out N and I might not get to go fishing at nearby Georgetown Lake tomorrow because the ER where she works apparently thinks paying loads of overtime is a good idea. (We actually did get to go, and caught over ten Rainbow Trout between us.  It was all catch-and-release.) 

4:25 - Packing up to go home and check on le chat.  (N working a 10 hour shift, so kitty may be stressed without companionship.) 

5:00 - Kitten checked, fed, box cleaned.  Catching up on the day's email.  I try to ignore email for large portions of the day...for efficiency! 

5:15 - Making miva_shuffle script for support team.  This script does a song and dance to remedy some occasional file locking problems we encounter with Miva. 

6:00 - Jonathan helped me navigate our arcane postgresql backups for our beta webmail system.  Gah!  It was missing a directory, that is all. 

6:15 - Done with miva_shuffle.

6:22 - Wrapping up work, giving animals evening meals.  Headed back downtown to meet N for Downtown Tonight. 

6:50 - Talked to Marianne about POSIX file permissions -- a customer struggling with getting two users RW access on the same files.  Modwest HQ is right outside Caras Park, the hub of downtown summer events.  Lucky for me Modwest cares about my results, not my schedule, so it was easy to get some support work done as I came through to the park. 

7:00 - Filled John's Chair at the Downtown Tonight Modwest booth and talked with Heather.  He was evaluating the brews, she was certain she'd forgotten everything computers while on vacation.  Full-Grown Men was the band for the evening. 

7:10 - N's here! We're eating at the Thai Spicy booth, Me - Green Curry Chicken, N - Cashew Nut Curry Chicken 

7:23 - Ilsa's Lemonade for drinks. 

7:45 - Broccoli calzone, I can't remember the real name, for a chaser; I'm still hungry... 

8:00 - Bike loaded in car, going to see N's dad, self-deprecating fly-fisher extraordinaire.  (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extraordinaire -- "Unlike most English adjectives, extraordinaire follows its subject."  I never noticed that was particularly unique.  Man, this writeup is informative AND entertaining.) 

8:30 - Got a fly fishing knot lesson -- the knot we learned is supposedly not in any of the books out there, it seems actually a passcode that grumbly guys with waders and wild hair use to identify the non-posers. 

9:00 - Three episodes of 30 Rock while doing house chores. 

11:20 - Bed.

Got other ideas for the Modwest Blog? Let us know in the Modwest Community.

-JM

A Day in the Modwest Life: Jonathan

"A Day in the Life" is our most requested blog topic currently, so here's a first installment. Featured today is one of our Systems Administrators, Jonathan.

Here's the play-by-play:

00:00
Finally finished the migration of a Plesk-based domain for a Managed Server customer that has had me stumped for 2 days.  The Plesk Migration Manager is picky and opaque in many ways.  It faulted on one large domain (11GB) out of many, without any real indication of the problem.  Since this domain was migrating from a Plesk 8.2 instance to a Plesk 9.2 instance, the alternative migration strategies were somewhat convoluted.

00:30
Finished documentation of the migration adventure of that Plesk-based domain.
Checked the Modwest Support queue (we use Request Tracker for our ticketing system) for any late-night urgent requests before turning in for the night.

04:30
Z, the 2.5-week old newborn, is fussy and needs a diaper change.

05:30
Z is upset.  After a quick verification of diaper situation and other potential causes of this state, took her downstairs and we napped on the couch to give my wife C a much needed break.

07:30
Z and I are awake again.  Took her back upstairs for a diaper change and a reunion with C.

08:30
Working with one of our Customer Support Specialists (L1) on a shared SSL certificate issue for one of our shared hosting environment customers.

09:00
Checking hardware upgrade options for one of our Managed Server customers.  He wants more disk space and there is the option of adding more drives to his server, not just replacing the existing drives.  Adding drives is a lot less work on our part and gives the customer even more disk space, while utilizing all of the drive bays in his server.

09:20
Researching filesystem options for our Cyrus mail servers in our shared hosting environment.  ZFS is an option, but we'd only really want to do that with Solaris at this point and we've had recent bad experiences with our Solaris implementation.  So, really, that's not an option right now.  That leaves the two main contenders as ext3 and reiserfs.  Finding dialog and debate on the merits of each type going back years.  There's a lot of old information out there -- beware.
Our new Systems Administrator, who has expertise in storage systems, is working on some great new projects for our storage environment.  Interesting stuff in the works.

10:10
Helped L1 look at an unusual account information discrepancy for one of our customers, which turned into a handful of customers.  All with similar account IDs.  Seems to be LDAP-related, so maybe a typo in a script recently.  It doesn't seem to be affecting performance for these customers, but shows some odd information internally when we view their account/billing information.

10:15
Packing up to head to the office.  Departure delayed while watching over Z while C grabs a shower.  Mentally thanking Modwest (again) for allowing me flexibility in my work schedule.

11:15
Arrived at the Modwest offices.  It's about a 10 minute walk from home to the office; along the bike path, across the Clark Fork River via the Orange Street Bridge, and along the bike path again to the Modwest Offices in the historic Wilma Building. 

Along the way, thought about scheduling hardware and software maintenance later this month for one of our VPS servers.
Ah!  Forgot that today is monthly clean-up day.  It's the day that our Operations Team puts other projects aside to clean up the things that have been fluttering around begging for attention.  I'm focusing on some Managed Server clean-up tasks -- preparing for decommissioning of some hardware that former customers are no longer using.

13:00
Digging out of monthly task clean-up.
Need food.
Also need to stop by a specific local restaurant/bar to ask about catering next month.

13:15
Generated list of Managed Server hardware that needs to be decommissioned over in our data center a few blocks away.
Spent a good while looking for traces of disappearing email deliveries for a Managed Server customer.
Corresponded with L1 regarding a database restore for another Managed Server customer.
Still need food.

14:30
Of course, I needed to talk to the appropriate catering person who is only available in the morning.  Will try again on Friday or Monday.
Stopped by the data center and synchronized the data from a to-be-decomissioned Managed Server machine to an external drive.  We usually keep that data around for a month after a Managed Server customer leaves Modwest, because it is not infrequent that they come back to us a week or two later because they forgot something important.

15:00
Figured out the best options for the Managed Server disk upgrade that I was researching earlier in the day.  Sent a note to the customer detailing the different options and my recommendation.  This particular customer likes details.

15:30
Started decommissioning resources, IPs in particular, of a former Managed Server customer. 

16:00
Familiarized myself with older Postfix/Mailscanner implementation on an older Red Hat Managed Server.  Ended up throwing a brick at the problem and configured Mailscanner to not scan any mail from the domain of our customer's client.  Not an ideal solution, but since it was quite difficult to get detailed information from the remote client on the types and content of the emails that he was sending, we decided to just let it all through.

16:30
Working on a database restoration for a Managed Server customer.  Made a note to self to complete our internal documentation on how to correspond with customers with regards to restore requests, specifically with Managed Server customers.  Some customers want their live data to be just like it was a day or two ago.  Others want the recovered data placed in a specific location that they can view.  Either way, it saves time for the Operations Team if we know what the customer wants when the task to restore gets passed along to us.

17:15
Big Boss says that I have too much on my plate and to delegate a specific Wusage migration task to him.  Yay!

17:30
Still working on that database restore for the Managed Server customer.
- While reading more about Cyrus email server filesystem recommendations
- While discussing, with another Systems Administrator, upstream bandwidth providers (who we shall not call out by name)
- While checking on available cabin lodging at Glacier next weekend
- While... uh oh.  We blew out the keg in the Modwest Kegerator
Ought to head home soon -- where soon was 2 hours ago.

18:00
Finished the database restore for that Managed Server customer.
Helped our Systems Engineer track down a problem with PostgreSQL backups for an internal VPS container.

18:07
Headed out the door for home.

18:30
Got home to another Z-related hospital bill.  Sigh.  So,...
Took a short nap with Z on the couch.

19:30
Prepared for short grocery store trip to the Good Food Store and debating whether I should take Z solo or not.  Seems a bit risky having a 10 minute separation between a possibly frantic hungry baby and her food source.

21:00
Back from the store, which wasn't such a short trip.  We all ended up going, which was probably not the most efficient use of our time, but that's okay.

21:30
Yay!  Heard from a friend on Facebook that I haven't heard from since 1997.  I was wary of my late-night FB signup 6 months ago, but I admit it has been fun to catch up with 'certain' old friends.  She's actually doing what she thought she'd end up doing -- scientific illustrations.
Making dinner and listening to KCRW streamed from Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, CA.  KCRW is streaming at our house most of the day.

23:45
Sent out party announcement to Modwest staff.  C and I eloped last summer (a week before our 16th anniversary) and are planning a party for friends and family in August.
Changed Z's diaper.
Went to bed.

So as requested, there's 24 hours of diaper-changing and systems administration at Modwest. We have two more volunteers for this blog project (so far), so stay tuned and we'll post those soon.

Got other ideas for the Modwest Blog? Let us know in the Modwest Community.

-JM

Storage Server Issue: What Happened

Earlier this week we experienced a storage server problem on the Modwest shared hosting system. I just wanted to give you the low-down on everything that happened and how we responded.

Late Monday night, the server had warned us about a possible hard drive issue; it contains a whopping 24 drives, so one drive having a problem is no big deal. So, the next day, we prepared to replace the drive, which wasn't marked as "bad", just "unavailable" for some reason.

To make a long story short, we hit a glitch related to the confluence of Sun's Solaris operating system and LSI RAID hardware. The server crashed, and wouldn't restart. And, the 500GB of customer data on it was inaccessible.

Because something similar happened last year too, we immediately began preparing an alternate server to take this one's place. The new one runs good ol' Debian Linux.

But we needed access to the current website data. We opened a ticket with Sun commercial support and they couldn't figure it out beyond "hardware problem", but agreed that reinstalling the operating system might work. Some 12 hours later, after numerous attempts, our server team succeeded in accessing the customer data and began transferring it off the problem server onto the server we had standing by and ready to take its place.

It takes a long time to copy millions of files totaling nearly 500GB of data between servers, even on our fast internal network, and so then a waiting game began.

We know our customers' sites are important to them, and we are analyzing all aspects of the entire event so we can improve our operation and prevent a similar recurrence in the future.

During the outage, our awesome Support Team had the chance to speak with countless customers about the issue. We did our best to provide timely, accurate information about the work in progress, and kept the public Status Page up to date frequently. Did we do ok?

The Ops Team put in a tremendous effort over two days to get things up and running again as safely and quickly as possible. If you have a congratulatory haiku for the guys, please post it here: https://feedback.modwest.com/topic/103/Soothing_haikus_for_Modwest_engineers

We've recently hired a storage specialist who is now part of the team responsible for monitoring, maintaining, and improving our entire infrastructure. I'm much more confident now that the sorts of problems we endured with you this week will be less likely in the future. Thanks for your patience and understanding, and feel free to send us an soothing haiku!

-JM

First Fruits of the Modwest Community

A couple weeks ago we launched the Modwest Feedback Community.  Already, we have heard important ideas form customers and implemented changes in response!

Here's a few examples:

• radiohead correctly pointed out that while Subversion (svn) is available in all Modwest shared hosting accounts, we hadn't done a very good job of letting people know. We quickly made a few changes so that it shows up on the big features page as well as the main webhosting page under Site Management. Thanks radiohead!
• In a comment thread, squiggle advised that our System Status page should continue displaying maintenance and issue alerts for more than just a few days, to aid our clients in debugging any issues they may be tackling. We took care of that a few days later, and now the last 30 days of notices display. 
• In an OnSite feature request topic, bryanb suggested we provide a more direct way for site owners to get into webmail. Turns out that already existed but we never told anyone! There are two options:

http://webmail.modwest.com
https://beta-webmail.modwest.com

As an example of what's being discussed right now, here's a recently popular topic (click it for details!):

So, we'd say our "kick off" was a great success. If you haven't visited recently, check it out, and participate for a chance to win real prizes like this one:

-JM

Feedback Community Launched!

Since our open beta announced in October, we've had some really helpful input by a handful of Feedback Community members, fixed a few things, and improved a few things. So it's time to draw back the curtain and invite all Modwest customers to participate.

Marianne is our Community Manager and as she said in an email invitation this morning:

It's not a survey. It's not really a forum, either. It's probably like nothing you've seen before, and if you visit the site you'll see what I mean.

• Share your ideas and feedback
• Discuss web hosting (and other web topics) with us and other customers
• Win prizes for participating in contests
• Let's get to know each other and hear what everyone has to say!

We also have some contests with real prizes planned, so we hope you'll check it out.

You can log in to the Feedback Community with any valid OnSite username, so feel free to forward your invitation to all your mailbox owners too!

See you in the "MFC"!

-JM

Happy Holidays to All

'Tis the season, as they say, and to give the Modwest Team a little extra time with their families, we'll have limited phone availability through the end of the month, as follows:

Tuesday, Dec 23rd: 7AM-5PM (All times are Mountain Time, GMT-7)
Wednesday, Dec 24th: 9AM-5PM
Thursday, Dec 25th: email only
Friday, Dec 26th: 9AM-5PM
Saturday, Dec 27th: email only
Sunday, Dec 28th: email only
Monday, Dec 29: 9AM-5PM
Tuesday, Dec 30th: 9AM-5PM
Wednesday, Dec 31st: 9AM-5PM
Thursday, Jan 1st: email only
Friday, Jan 2nd: 9AM-5PM

All the usual escalation contact options will be available to managed server customers throughout. Our regular phone support hours will resume the following week.

No matter which winter holiday you observe, we wish you a happy one.

-JM

Modwest Open House - December 11th

Now that we're (finally, mostly) settled in our new office, we'd like you to see it.

Next Thursday evening, we invite you to drop by and meet some of the people that run the servers, build our new feedback community, answer the phone, and everything else.

Here's the details:

What: Modwest Open House

When: Thursday, December 11th, 2008. 5PM-8PM

Where: 110 Caras Drive, Missoula, MT (click for a map)

Why: To see our gorgeous new office space (and demolition and construction photos), put some faces to names, and share some beer, wine, and hors d'oeuvres.

If you're in the neighborhood on the evening of Thursday the 11th, we hope you can join us.

Photos from the New Office

Well, we're finally mostly settled, and Chris, an Internet Application Engineer at Modwest, has taken some gorgeous photos of the new Modwest office space. Check them out if you're interested.

The historic theater building we're in is also downtown's largest concert venue, and tonight, Ozomatli is playing, an "urban-Latino-and-beyond collision of hip hop and salsa, dancehall and cumbia, samba and funk, merengue and comparsa, East LA R&B and New Orleans second line, Jamaican ragga and Indian raga". 
I suspect we'll be treated to a sound check shortly. ;)

-JM

Feedback Community Open Beta

As we recently mentioned, we've been working on something new that will help businesses and organizations to listen better to their customers.

We're nearly ready to invite everybody, but for now, just you lucky blog readers get the link:

  

https://feedback.modwest.com

There, you can log in with your OnSite or mailbox username and password.

The idea behind the site is pretty simple: you can ask and answer questions, or vote ('tis the season, after all) on existing answers. Already, people are talking about:

• What features do you want added to OnSite?
• What format should the Modwest knowledge base take?

There are still a few missing features in the Feedback Community that we'll be adding in the coming weeks. One item is the separation of your OnSite username from your community display name. This might be important to you if your Modwest username isn't something you want known to the world.

We're very interested to hear your feedback, and so your participation in the Feedback Community earns you member points! These points will provide the foundation for contests and prizes in the future, so we hope you'll check it out.

Also, look out for me and the rest of the Modwest Team in the community; you can tell who's who by these little badges:

Administrators: These are the folks responsible for managing the community software itself.

Community Manager: Helps newcomers and generally keeps the conversation flowing smoothly. Modwest Customer Care Specialist Marianne is our Community Manager. Contact her for help any time.

Modwest Team: Listeners and community participants who work here.

In a few weeks we'll do a super-mega email blast to all customer contacts. In the meantime, feel free to share this post and the https://feedback.modwest.com link with other Modwest customers. Let the voting begin!

-JM