Evan Reiter

Can do.

Didn't we cancel the HTC after two attempts? The latter of which was plagued by the problems with the e-mail and website which, had they not been problems during the lead up to the HTC, probably could have drawn even bigger crowds. We had at least 2 HTC events in New York, one in Washington, and one in Chicago. I also consider the multiple (at least 5) Dance in New York events that we've had as part of those. I'd say the Dance in New York / HTC events took place for a period of 3+ years before being supplanted with the Et. The HTC wasn't canned because of traffic, either; the fact that members signed up for the event and didn't fly showed that the concept wasn't working. Since the HTC had effectively become a twice-a-year event anyway, it made more sense to replace it with other major events like the Flight for the Fight, 60 Hours of ATC (different concepts), anniversary celebration, etc., which have been more popular. Right, that's why I said: This isn't a "let's jump ship and give up" post. It's an honest attempt to garner additional feedback to see whether there is something obvious and easy that people would prefer to be changed or whether it's just a matter of giving people more time to join in. Since I plan to discuss this topic with controllers during our next meeting, I'd love to hear from some more members outside of our community of controllers.

That's very good feedback, actually -- thanks for providing it. I'm curious to know whether you are in the minority or not. Everyone may not be training for a real-world IFR rating, but if that change of charts/phrases/procedures is what's keeping people away, then there are things we can do to change that. Other thoughts?

Those who flew during this afternoon's European Tour (featuring Manchester and London-Heathrow) knew that we had another day of weird charts, new procedures, and funny/sad attempts at British accents, fortunately (for everyone) not by me this time. For once, I didn't have to correct people who readback "climb to FL110" and I got to use phraseology that's a little closer to home to what we use in Canada. I've thoroughly enjoyed controlling the first two European Tour events. I hope those who have participated enjoyed the change of scenery and procedures as much as I have. Given my enjoyment of the challenging airspaces and different procedures, I was surprised to see that most people flying in these events tend to be the same people who fly our regular events. I was expecting, given the number of requests we've had on these forums for ATC and events outside of our regular airspaces and times, a little more traffic, and some new voices. For example, I often see the "Tango squadron" getting together on Tuesday afternoons to fly our Regional Circuit routes. I thought the event would be great for this group and have been surprised not to see them online. Many of our members from time zones for which our 8-11pm ET events don't work haven't made it to a Tour event yet. That, along with a lower-than-normal attendance during today's event, got me thinking that I should "take it to the streets" to see what you guys think of the event. I'm well aware that it takes time for people to accept and become committed to new things. It will, of course, take even longer for an event that we hold once a month to consistently draw in new members from different time zones. That's understandable, and I'm not about to cancel the European Tour event after just two attempts. A lot of people have and continue to put a lot of effort into making the events work. But that being said, I want to make sure that the events we're putting on are aligned with the wants of our members. In a recent Poll Question of the Week (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1147&start=20#p11574), 83% of members said they would be interested in participating in the Tour again. I was expecting today's event to be a little busier than it was, so I'm here asking you: what are your thoughts on the Tour? Have you been flying in the events? If so, why? If not, why not, and what can we change? We have a large compliment of members from around the world and in different time zones. Today, we've had ATC consistently since 3pm ET, but we've seen the biggest traffic during our peak hours (the highest-rated controller online now is BOS_A). All of that's making me wonder: why?

Frequent users of our website will likely have noticed that, along with the links to our Facebook and Twitter profiles, we recently added an "Admin" section to our website's navigation bar that adds links to two new pages. These pages are now viewable to the general community. The A-Team page provides members with an overview of the A-Team (BVA's administrators) and profiles for each of those involved. The Our Expectations page is a response to requests for a formal policy/conduct document to be available to our members. All users can view this page, which talks about BVA's shared values and our vision to become the best FSX-based aviation community through realistic and professional pilot-controller interactions, exciting and appealing events, pilot training, and software and add-on technologies. There shouldn't be any surprises here as the information should be congruent with the values and policies that have been adhered to by our administrators for the past several years. Now, however, users have a more formal and visible way of determining what those are. Information on the "Our Expectations" page is provided for members to have a better understanding of what constitutes acceptable behavior at BVA. It supplements our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and the Privacy Statement for New Members. As always, please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns about our policies, shared values, or expectations of members. You have any number of ways of reaching administrators, including the forums, our individual e-mail addresses, and an anonymous form on our "Contact Us" page. I hope we have done our best to make our expectations clear to the community, and make ourselves as available as possible to address any concerns, given the real-world limitations on the time of our members, controllers, and administrators.

I think so.

There's some room in the schedule. I'm going to add an event on Sunday, August 28 that will be a repeat of the Tuesday night event that we do. For old-times' sake, we'll do KBOS & KJFK on August 23 (Tuesday) and August 28 (Sunday). If there is still interest in a bad weather event, then we can make the Tuesday night event a bad weather one. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1691 Originally the plan was to do the foul weather on the Friday night...but since we might have a Tracon Tour going on the next day I wouldn't want to impinge on anyone's good time.

It's always tricky to find a day that will work for everyone. I've wanted to get back into having the double-play events (Rc on Tuesday and Friday) but I've been waiting for a good event in our home airspace that we can do in conjunction with a bad-weather event (as requested by other members). Keep an eye out for it in the next few weeks and we'll see how it goes.

Good point. Let's ask that next week...followed by "which non-ZBW ARTCC would you most like to see staffed more often?"

All user have been re-activated and everyone should be able to login to the website fine. Again, please let us know if you have any issues with the site. The last post about an issue prompted a long response from me because I wanted to explain my rationale to everyone and it took a long post to do that. But without getting information from people about issues, I can't fix them, and I am always grateful to the people that are willing to stand up to let us know something is wrong. That's why one of my personal development goals is to be more responsive and open when responding to problems in crisis situations. For now, let's hope that none of that will happen again now that the site has been restored...

To address additional functionality concerns, I have reverted the website back to the previous version we were using. While it will now mean manual adjustments of any text, we also have our normal editor back for ATCs, and should have resolved the login issues we were having. We will thoroughly test the new version of DotNetNuke while waiting for a patch to come out to fix the issues you noticed. As part of reverting the website, some user accounts were deleted. If your BVA ID is on the list below, you will not be able to sign in to FlightDesk or the website today. I will manually re-create your accounts when I have time, probably tonight, and be addressing you individually by e-mail. ZEGO Blue_Skies97 CM039 gruffalo95 president757 Again, please let me know of any issues right away (as Tom and Brandon have) so that we can address them quickly. Thanks again!

...and now the site is broken. Working on it.

I made this post in a response to a question Tom asked me in a restricted section of the forums and thought it was worth passing along to the general community as well. Good question. The content management system that we use -- DotNetNuke (DNN) -- works something like the OS on your computer in that regular updates come out for the software. The same is true with our forums. Normally these updates are minor, fixing small bugs and security holes. The forums were updated at the same time as the website but I haven't noticed a difference. I was expecting the same with the website. It's important to make the updates quickly because they often address security holes and make a big functionality improvement. The longer we wait, and the more updates we miss, the worse will be the eventual updgrade and the more likely that upgrade will be to, for want of a better term, blow up. However, it turns out DNN has totally re-done the interface of the website. This was unexpected. Nevertheless, it's something we had to do. The website on our previous ISP was so bug-ridden in part because we were using a version of the operating system that was 2.5 years old. We had to complete 2 years' worth of updates when we migrated the server over and that process caused all sorts of problems. When the ATC page broke a few months ago, it was because we updated a module that hadn't been touched since 2006. Ever since then we've been keeping up with the updates because eventually we would be in the same situation if we never updated. So your next question is probably "why didn't we test the update more thoroughly before we updated the site live?" That's a good question and the answer is two-fold. Firstly, it's impossible to update the site behind the scenes and then release it to you...there's just no functionality like that. It's not like we can make an update, test it, and then click "go" and let you all see it. The only thing we have been able to do -- thanks to the hard work of Phil, our soon-to-be DNN expert (we hope) -- is to have someone set up a local copy of DNN on their own machine. This can't be connected to our DNN, so any changes we make on our side have to be made again on his, users don't update, etc. But at least we have an idea as to what we're getting into. This situation was unique for several reasons. Firstly, a previous update we performed on the website on Sunday (a minor update) was completed incorrectly because we tried to do it at a time when multiple users were on the website (since neither Phil nor I could manage to stay awake until 3am like I did for this update). Consequently, several features (like the ability to change font sizes/colors) weren't working properly. When the newest version came out Thursday, I thought it would be a good opportunity to get the newest version installed to resolve the font bug and, since I had some time, dedicate another Friday night to BVA and stay awake until late to make that update at a time when nobody would be inconvenienced. Because Phil is on vacation, we weren't able to do our usual offline testing. On Saturday morning, as you saw from the original post, I completed the updates around 3am. Obviously we have a few issues that resulted from them -- these are the things you've been complaining about. It was a tough call: make the upgrade, fix the issues, but chance major changes, or wait for Phil to return, put up with the inability to make changes to fonts (for at least 2 weeks since next weekend is a long weekend), and then try to find another available time to do an upgrade. Contrary to popular belief, I actually don't like missing friends' birthday parties to be here making updates but I do because I'm afraid of what will happen if I try to make a major update to the site in the middle of the day. Evidently I chose wrong on this occasion. I apologize for the extreme inconvience you have been caused by the website's lack of functionality. I do not know DNN very well and am spread relatively thin but will do my best to research and fix any of the issues we've seen with the login and controllers' event sign-up. Since I can't reproduce the login issue, that one will be very difficult to fix. The controllers' sign-up will probably be resolved by making the event details pages into regular DNN pages rather than pop-up windows (which I've wanted to do for a little while anyway). If it makes you feel any better, Bill has also had to work hard on a fix for FlightDesk since the upgrade changed the way the login page is structured (not the way it functions) and that meant no users could sign in to FlightDesk. We're all scrambling to give you the best possible experience; I'm sorry we can't do it fast enough. I'm also sorry that I wasn't able to perform a seamless upgrade. Hopefully DNN will come out with a fix for the issues with the login page and we'll have a fully-functional website again soon.

I am unable to reproduce the error.

Website maintenance complete. We have performed a MAJOR overhaul to the main website's backend; this should not be too apparent to users but there may be a few pages that have been modified. If you notice anything strange about the website, or any pages that do not look as they should, please let us know!

The website and forums may be offline temporarily starting at 11:30am on Friday, July 22 and continuing until 2-4am on Saturday, July 23.

Our maintenance is now complete.

The ISP's maintenance is now complete. BVA will be performing upgrades of our website and forums for the next few minutes. You may experience some downtime with both applications but should have full access restored shortly.

We have featured airports in the Caribbean and Hawaii during our Getaway events to both locations. We do consistent Rc events in Hawaii and the Caribbean as well. I'm not sure when the next one will be coming up since we were in the Caribbean not long ago.

That scenery is entirely compatible. Enjoy!

Our ISP will be taking our website and forums offline for approximately 8 hours beginning on July 16 at 1am ET for file system maintenance. This maintenance work is being performed externally by our ISP. This outage will not affect our FSX server, but it does appear that both our website and forums will be offline for the duration of the maintenance. Our ISP states the maintenance is "required to correct problems with the file system and provide more reliable system performance".

We had a great time in Europe this afternoon featuring EGCC and EGPF in the first leg of our European Tour. The events will continue on weekend and weekday afternoons going forward. In addition to working in some new phraseology, a few of our controllers (myself included, unfortunately) tried out their British accents on frequency. I recorded a snapshot of each one so we could ask you...which controller has the best British accent? ChrisOlmstead.WAV[/attachment:rqvatf6z] Cpais.wav[/attachment:rqvatf6z] Evanet.wav[/attachment:rqvatf6z] Ferrari308guy.wav[/attachment:rqvatf6z] regs695.WAV[/attachment:rqvatf6z]

Fortune really has nothing to do with it; "BVA's administration" has been a little busy when it comes to events. Minor things like responding to every single request for Regional Circuits by juggling our schedule and planning the European Tour, on which the poster quoted above spent a lot of time working, have kept us busy. The European Tour has been a priority for slightly longer than a foul weather event. Given my real-world work constraints, I would have to restart the server at approximately 7:30pm ET to set the weather before the event. I'd rather not do that right before the Regional Circuit event so what about if we bring back our old "double play" concept? The next time we have a Tuesday Night Rc in the Boston/New York area, we'll do it again on the following Friday (assuming there is no conflict) and have foul weather set at one of the airports that night. We cannot do for this KACK & KLGA event because although the airports would be ideal for it, we have a GA Fly-in that Friday night. Since I am liable to forget, I will rely on you folks. When you see an event upcoming that will work, give me at least 1 weeks' notice via these forums. In other words, next time you see in the "coming up next week" box two northeast airports, let me know and we'll set it up.

Real-world: Supplement to CAP413 Radiotelephony Manual - A quick reference guide to UK Phraseology A condensed version was written these forums at: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1474

Phraseology Quick Reference Guide.pdf[/attachment:a6ahnuyd] A huge thanks to Claudio (Cpais) who created this document, along with Pierre (Pierul) and Josh (TheNavyReapers) for review.