Sugarloaf, Update Your Website.

[loafer89]

One of the reasons that we stayed away from Sugarloaf this weekend was because of the website and not knowing for sure what trails where opened, had snowmaking done on them, etc.

Personally this is quite important to me when driving 300+ miles to the mountain and with gas costing alot of money.

 

[DJAK]

It is unfortunate. It is being addressed. Your comments are being heard. Thank you for your passion regarding these resorts. We would all like the websites to resume full functionality quickly. In the meantime do not hesitate to call the resorts or the snowphones.

Snowphones are 207 824 5200 at Sunday River and 207 237 6808 at Sugarloaf.

We hope you will still consider visiting our resorts while we iron out the web issues. The early season conditions are primo. The resort snow conditions pages are still chock full of info as are the Sunday River message board and Trav's SL board.

http://www.sugarloaf.com/daily.html
http://www.sugarloaftoday.com/chat
http://www.sundayriver.com/community/
http://www.sundayriver.com/conditions.html

 

[Vortex]

Djak..... Loafer 89 came to the river instead. :idea: The info here and the river board lead him to his descion. I think those were his words. could not hear well with the Guns screaming.:razz:

I put it on the Loaf board..... How about having The loaf employees post updates on trail conditions like you guys are know on the boards to give updates. I have found that helpful and a good attempted to give us what you can.

 

[SLyardsale]

It is unfortunate. It is being addressed. Your comments are being heard. Thank you for your passion regarding these resorts. We would all like the websites to resume full functionality quickly. In the meantime do not hesitate to call the resorts or the snowphones.

Snowphones are 207 824 5200 at Sunday River and 207 237 6808 at Sugarloaf.

We hope you will still consider visiting our resorts while we iron out the web issues. The early season conditions are primo. The resort snow conditions pages are still chock full of info as are the Sunday River message board and Trav's SL board.

http://www.sugarloaf.com/daily.html
http://www.sugarloaftoday.com/chat
http://www.sundayriver.com/community/
http://www.sundayriver.com/conditions.html

DJAK forgot to list k2trav.com. Just an oversite I'm sure.

 

[loafer89]

Djak..... Loafer 89 came to the river instead. :idea: The info here and the river board lead him to his descion. I think those were his words. could not hear well with the Guns screaming.:razz:

I put it on the Loaf board..... How about having The loaf employees post updates on trail conditions like you guys are know on the boards to give updates. I have found that helpful and a good attempted to give us what you can.

Most definately that was the case, not being able to know what specific trails where opened kept me away from Sugarloaf early season and we went to Sunday River instead.

Honestly having the trail and lift report page on sugarloaf.com still list April 30th, 2007 is pathetic at best. It's good to finally see a list of opened trails in the snow report text.

 

[K2Trav]

Just curious. I know you mentioned that they tried to get you to take your site down. Was that just ASC or has Boyne made that attempt too? Because you seem more pissed off than just being annoyed at their web incompetence would lead someone to be.

I forgot to mention that Sugarloaf management wanted to kick me off the mtn for reporting wet snowguns last year

 

[DJAK]

DJAK forgot to list k2trav.com. Just an oversite I'm sure.

Ha.
I posted his chatroom and gave him credit. That's reasonable...no?

 

[SLyardsale]

.....Sunday River message board and Trav's SL board.

http://www.sugarloaf.com/daily.html
http://www.sugarloaftoday.com/chat
http://www.sundayriver.com/community/
http://www.sundayriver.com/conditions.html

OK you mentioned it, and most here I guess would know his site - thought maybe you'd want to extend an olive branch, and just put it in the list of links you posted.

 

[SLyardsale]

http://www.k2trav.com has updated info on Sugarloaf including open trails and conditions - he updates it every other day or so. Also, http://www.sugarloaftoday.com (without the /chat) will bring you to thier home page. They also put up Boss Hogg Snowreporter vid clips or course also found on http://www.myspace.com/bosshoggsnowreporter

 

[skircher]

Sugarloaf website

Folks,

I assure you we are aware and have prioritized getting the Sugarloaf website working properly.

We are making progress everyday with many folks working on getting the issues rectified.

You should soon see a marked improvement including getting the "seemingly simple" to fix lift and trail status page.

The teams have actually done an incredible job of migrating the site that had been significantly hacked while being hosted on the ASC legacy server.

The security of our customers data was the most important thing to protect and we moved on to then getting the most important pages functional. The team was able to do this without any significant disruption in service - aka putting up a simple temporary site in the old sites place.

They have effectively rebuilt both Sugarloaf and Sunday River from scratch from behind the scenes and still operating it at the same time. We are rebuilding and installing an entirely new content manage system that is far more secure and robust that what was in place before.

Comments from various sources about lack of effort or understanding of the importance of this mode of communication is clearly off base and not based on facts.

We appreciate the patience to the many loyal sugarloafers who get their information from our site. It will be fully operatonal shortly.....within a week I am being told.

In the meantime - get out and ski or ride!

Respectfully,

SK

aka. supposedly the guy who doesn't understand the internet's importance, surprising I was able to find this forum with my purported incompetence..........

 

[trailertrash]

Folks,

I assure you we are aware and have prioritized getting the Sugarloaf website working properly.

We are making progress everyday with many folks working on getting the issues rectified.

You should soon see a marked improvement including getting the "seemingly simple" to fix lift and trail status page.

The teams have actually done an incredible job of migrating the site that had been significantly hacked while being hosted on the ASC legacy server.

The security of our customers data was the most important thing to protect and we moved on to then getting the most important pages functional. The team was able to do this without any significant disruption in service - aka putting up a simple temporary site in the old sites place.

They have effectively rebuilt both Sugarloaf and Sunday River from scratch from behind the scenes and still operating it at the same time. We are rebuilding and installing an entirely new content manage system that is far more secure and robust that what was in place before.

Comments from various sources about lack of effort or understanding of the importance of this mode of communication is clearly off base and not based on facts.

We appreciate the patience to the many loyal sugarloafers who get their information from our site. It will be fully operatonal shortly.....within a week I am being told.

In the meantime - get out and ski or ride!

Respectfully,

SK

aka. supposedly the guy who doesn't understand the internet's importance, surprising I was able to find this forum with my purported incompetence..........

do ya like apples!?

 

[SLyardsale]

Folks,

I assure you we are aware and have prioritized getting the Sugarloaf website working properly.

We are making progress everyday with many folks working on getting the issues rectified.

You should soon see a marked improvement including getting the "seemingly simple" to fix lift and trail status page.

The teams have actually done an incredible job of migrating the site that had been significantly hacked while being hosted on the ASC legacy server.

The security of our customers data was the most important thing to protect and we moved on to then getting the most important pages functional. The team was able to do this without any significant disruption in service - aka putting up a simple temporary site in the old sites place.

They have effectively rebuilt both Sugarloaf and Sunday River from scratch from behind the scenes and still operating it at the same time. We are rebuilding and installing an entirely new content manage system that is far more secure and robust that what was in place before.

Comments from various sources about lack of effort or understanding of the importance of this mode of communication is clearly off base and not based on facts.

We appreciate the patience to the many loyal sugarloafers who get their information from our site. It will be fully operatonal shortly.....within a week I am being told.

In the meantime - get out and ski or ride!

Respectfully,

SK

aka. supposedly the guy who doesn't understand the internet's importance, surprising I was able to find this forum with my purported incompetence..........

SK - have always appreciated your posts - appreciated the fact that you went on the SL chat on Thanksgiving Day to address the web site issue - appreciate the candor in your responses to season pass prices this summer. I don't understand why you would continue to fan the flames here. Jees -obviously there is no "olive branch" on this issue. Too bad.... K2's last post was in regard to the prior regime - no different IMO than your reference to their (AMC's) unsecure web site that you inherited.

 

[SpinmasterK]

Having just gone through this at Killington, I understand what both SR and SL are facing and I know that they are doing everything they can to get their ENTIRE website rebuilt. This isn't something that happens overnight! In fact it took us almost four months to get our platform up and running and we're still in the process of dialing in everything.
While we don't want to throw ASC under the bus, the platform we all used for our websites was cumbersome, slow and unreliable. SR's and SL's new websites will offer a much better online experience, but it takes time!

 

[loafer89]

Thanks for the update because for some of us Sugarloaf is a long haul love affair. For me personally it's a better than 600 mile round trip drive and I like to know exactly what is opened before commiting to a trip.

 

[Mildcat]

To be honest I didn't expect the industry reps to chime in but i really appreciate the fact they did to clear things up. To a layman like me :dunce: it looked like they just didn't update the site. I guess they did do a good job to integrate the temp site seamlessly.

One suggestion, you do update the "daily report" on the page. Maybe if you could put a note on there saying the "trail and Lift " updates aren't up right now but will be fixed soon, I know I'd be more patient with the site.

 

[Vortex]

I didn't realize software integration was so difficult .....
*** NEWS FLASH***
I don't CARE about your software problems ..
I don't want to CALL you ...
I USE the internet as my main source of information that's why I spend so much money to stay connected..
I am the consumer and I do Judge you by your website updating skills...
HPD I am not ANGRY...
Hire more software engineers or outsource it to India or Korea ..
Do whatever it takes to get the website up and running and stop with the excuses..
NOT that I mean anything bad by what I just said ..

lighten up you grumpy old bastard.:razz: Come to the river and I'll take you around. Hey the interactive trail map works on the River board know. A new updated toy.

 

[riverc0il]

What OldsnowboarderME said. No one cares about excuses, consumers want to see results. As molecat suggested, a temporary update saying "this part of our web site doesn't work, we will have it up ASAP" would be a simple and quick band aid. Not saying it is easy converting a web page (heck, as a web master that just converted an entire site of hundreds of documents from hand code to wordpress this Summer, I know what type of hell even simple copy and paste can be let alone changing architecture... then again, I don't get paid one cent for my time...). But companies need to address aspects of the web page that are completely broken and putting forth bogus info, especially when it is the part of the web page most people probably use the most. Should be a top priority and these guys have had, what... half a year or whatever to create a simple band aid or temporary fix if the problem was that big to have taken so long.

 

[Vortex]

I kind of hinted here the River folks did a good job of getting the word out.

Alot of grumblings, but most everyone had an idea of what was going on and they used message boards as one tool to get out the info

. Ie River's opening day press realease was posted here by AK. I posted and suggested the Loaf try some similar ideas.

 

[skircher]

Folks,

The migration started only 4 or 5 weeks ago....the hacking that caused this issue occurred at that time and we had to make the move to a new server several months ahead of the rebuild that was ongoing...otherwise a bunch of customer data was potentially going to be comprimised. Security over function was the call.....and the right call. Just keeping the site alive was a monumental win.

If we hadn't been forced to make the move we would have had a fully functional site both before and after the cutover - which would have occured sometime later this winter.

I agree, we could have and need to do a better job of posting temporary information the daily report page while the more robust sections of the lift and trail report are being rebuilt. That message has been sent to the team.

However, in my humble opinion the daily report does give most of the key information for someone to decide to come or not to come...just not every detail of which run or lift is open.

Regards and I do appreiciate the energy and enthusiasm,
SK

PS:I now see why others in the industry stay away from posting in these forums................hopefully this information was helpful to the folks that want the truth and don't take that as excuses. Silence doesn't seem to me to be an alternative that makes much sense.

One of our core values at Boyne is to be open, honest and timely hopefully that will fit with the New England Ski culture....sometimes the news isn't always what folks want to hear.

 

[MonkeyBrook]

SK:

Thanks for your response. I am finding your team to be very open, my family (5 gold passes) has been at SR 7 days this year and we are very very impressed by what we have seen. I couldnt care less about the interactive website, your (Snowreporter, AK, etc)in getting information about the mountain out to the public. I would much rather see you concentrate on blowing snow, than worrying about a website. Afterall, only a few short years ago there was no website, interactive map, etc.....there are so many ways to get info.

As you will notice with these forums, there are always people who will complain and frankly take the joy out of what is supposed to be a fun activity. There is a difference between suggestions and ridiculous complaints. Speaking for my family, I rate the season as an 11 on a scale of 10 so far.

I thought you might appreciate some positive comments. Thanks again for your communication and efforts.