COE website

PawPaw_n_Gram wrote:
Rock Island District site seems to be working today - but I've also experienced frustration with the conversion of the individual district web sites to all be under the same control / format. There are a lot of broken links in the various sites, and in other agency sites linking to COE sites.

Wierd, it was up yesterday, but the updates were dates March 3rd. A little behind the times.

My 20 years in the Navy was during the dark ages before the internet. The last time I ‘worked’ for the US govt was as a COE volunteer in Connecticut in 2015.

At that time the bureaucracy to change something on a website was extensive.

I was only trying to get some of the info on recreation.gov updated to reflect the current conditions.

One thing I think might be an issue with the current COE and other govt web sites relates to mirrors. I say the problem starting to develop in the retail world back in the 2000s.

The district web site is not in ONE place. There is of course a master, but what you see and what I see might be on different storage servers in different places across the country.

There was a company which was making a fortune in 2006 with their proprietary software to keep those multiple servers and order databases and payment processing all in sync. The company I worked for paid them in the mid to high six figures a year.

‘Cloud’ computing has brought that down to a much lower cost, but has cut back on the quality of the integration and the security of the data. The US govt, especially the military is obsessed with security.

I’ve seen multiple instances of access being denied that results in broken links just because a broken piece of equipment was replaced. On a technical level I can understand it. On a user level it drives me nuts.

And with the current trend to contract out more and more things, I can only see it getting worse.

Very odd now, the site has been up and down the past few weeks, but now since the Mississippi is flooding in the district, and they have to close most of the campgrounds, the site has been up and running and regularly updated.
We got to our favorite COE CG at 7pm Friday evening and were told they might have to close on Sunday, and they would let us know on Saturday sometime. Well, Saturday morning, they let us know we had to get out in the next hour or so. I wish the website had been updated before I left.
Someone getting away with not doing a part of their job when things are running smooth?