http://libsyn.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=828

Hi Folks,

First we'd like to apologize for the lack of communication. We have
been in the weeds so to speak, and while our developers usually man
the boards simultaneously, they are working to make sure that this
thing can scale to handle the growth of the libsyn userbase, as well
as the onslaught of new traffic we've been seeing. Podcasting is a
monster, and when something goes wrong, it is an all encompassing
balancing act to remedy the problem while minimizing interruptions.
Libsyn is four guys with day jobs. We started the company with 100
bucks. Is that an attempt at an excuse? Maybe, but more importantly
I'd like to convince you all that we are sweating to make this work.
We'd like to kick the day jobs. We love podcasting for all of its
qualities; the democratization of media, the leveling of the playing
field, for its insatiable hunger for bandwidth, and ability to blow
out servers.

When this thing started in October, we set out to make podcasters
lives easier and to charge 5 dollars to do so. Then there were a lot
less podcasters, and the World hadn't heard of this crazy thing yet.
I don't want to state the obvious but, things have grown. You guys
are kind to call our quirks growing pains. Please believe us that we
do not want to fail you. Just to toot our horns for a sec, we banged
out a flash player in a day by request of our users, we tried to get
the itunes tags out the night of the release, but the downed stats
and our dropping off with regards to your questions was only due to
the fact that we are in the stuff over here. But we are going to
lock this thing down.

Secondly we'd like to apologize for the state of the stats. Our
number one priority is always that the media gets to your listeners.
Stats is number two. If the media delivery network doesn't stay up,
there are no downloads to record anayway, so that's our reasoning. We
understand how important statistics are to the podcaster. It is the
audience that feeds you, and seeing that audience grow is what pushes
you to improve your show. And not only that, sponsors are right
around the corner, and your success with them relies on your ability
to verify your audience. From the beginning we wanted to provide
folks with the a stats system that was tailored to podcasters. Our
display engine has been a mess, but we're getting closer to having it
locked down. We've brought in some help to make the stats scalable to
the proportions we need them to be.

Keep in mind it is a parsing and display issue. All traffic is being
counted. We believe our XML logs to be accurate, but to eliminate any
doubt spurred by this discussion, we'll be validating them against the
raw server logs this weekend. As far as any numbers being low and if
it is related to the unavailability of your media; we currently have
experienced very little media downtime (especially compared to stats
downtime) for your high priority data. Please remember that our
pricing is based around the high priority/low priority model. The
archive system has had some failures, where the lower priority
archive servers have not been able to keep up with the listener
demand, which is again a scaling issue that we've just recently
addressed by adding more / better hardware to our archive network.

Our only excuse for our negligence in responding to your questions is
the same excuse for timeliness (or lack thereof) in getting our stats
back online: all hands are on deck to make this work, and all our
resources are focused on the dev and making sure that libsyn has a
bright future. I will try to better handle updates on our progress in
the future.

It sounds like we will be losing some of you due to our handling of
these issues. We take this very seriously. We hate to lose you.
Hopefully we can regain your confidence and business in the future.
Talk is talk, action is better and you should know we have taken your
complaints to heart. To all our customers thank you for your
business, as you helped us build this company. We want to make you
proud of us, and we will do our best to serve you the podcasters.

thanks on behalf of the entire libsyn team,

Dave Mansueto

feel free to contact me:
skype: tacomancini
aim: tacomancini