It’s been a few weeks since we last posted an update, and we wanted to let you know what’s been going on at younow!
First, the partial video outage on November 21-24
Late in the afternoon on November 21, our video servers went down. This was due to a change in our DNS settings on Amazon, which hosts that part of our video infrastructure, and was caused by a mistake made by our staff. DNS settings are records that allow users to access websites and emails by their domain names, and when they get changed, users can no longer access those domains until those changes propagate through the whole infrastructure of the internet. This is what happened to us – we saw the change, fixed it, and then it took 2-3 days for everyone on Earth to actually see the change despite us frantically calling individual internet service providers all over the world to get them to update their records. This is also why some people – actually, around 90% – were able to stream within an hour or two of us making a fix, and why others, especially those in countries that meter traffic or users who use a small, local internet service provider, had to wait days.
The last reports we saw of issues with our DNS settings were at 3am New York time on Sunday, and we believe this issue is now solved.
Other bugs
There are a few large bugs that we are still working on:
Some Streamnow.pro users cannot connect to the service. We’ve tried several dozen fixes on this already, and have not yet narrowed down the problem. The engineer who works on this has streamnow as their top priority for the week.
Audio is echoing / not coming through consistently for some broadcasts, especially in the Middle East. We continue to work on this bug; we do not have an estimated time for a fix yet.
Bar rewards were not granted over the past few days. This is a database issue that we are fixing, and we will, of course, give out bar rewards once fixed.
Spamming gifts breaks some missions. We are aware of this one too, and it is also a database issue. While we’re working on fixing it, just don’t spam mission gifts in the meantime. If you wait 5 seconds between sends, you’ll get your reward automatically. If we have to verify that you actually sent the gift, it’ll take a lot longer.
Stuff for smaller streamers
We actually did launch this a month ago, just like we promised. We didn’t shout about it from the rooftops because we wanted to see how well it worked first… and the answer is it did.
We changed what our explore page looks like on both web and iOS, and with that, we also changed the trending score pretty dramatically. Most people looked at what changed for AFK broadcasts (they fall very far down trending after 4 hours); however, we also promote new and lower-level streamers much more heavily in the trending score.This means that new and lower-level streamers are often part of the top group of streamers recommended to our users. In the past, it was pretty much impossible for a new or low-level broadcaster to appear near the top of trending.
The results of this have been pretty dramatic for lower-level streamers – while it’s early days, the number of average views for low-level streamers has skyrocketed, while the views for established streamers has stayed consistent.
Bonus Likes All Christmas Season!
We will be running 30-60 minute flash sales throughout the holidays to give bonus likes on gifts! If you see it, take advantage – it’s not a glitch!
Bringing in new people
One of the complaints I hear most often is that we don’t advertise enough, and that there aren’t enough new people on the platform. While we are careful with our advertising dollars and our budget for that is small compared to other platforms, our traffic is actually up over 30% so far in November over October. This is due to us being much more effective with our ad dollars (especially now that the US election, which made most advertising incredibly expensive, is over) and, more importantly, because users like you are sharing our platform. So please, keep sharing it – it’s working, and we all benefit from the results.
Changes coming soon
We will roll out the new explore page on Android in the next week or two, and then we are working on a couple new products that make it easier for users to stream from their phone and also make it easier to meet new people on younow. Our team, as always, is small (although we have been growing!) and so we won’t publish a timeline for these new major releases.
Want more? Contact Jon
Use the form below to send a comment to Jon and our support team, and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. Contact Jon
Comments