Eklund’s Excuses 2009

Eklund finally decided to face his members and offer up the same excuses that he has for the last 3 years. He decided to take the chance that his members were too technologically illiterate to really know any better and threw out server and traffic information lies to explain the site issues, which has become an annual issue along with his inability to truely break anything except maybe wind….

What he does not seem to get through his thick skull is the fact that NOBODY could actually move from page to page on his site for most of the day and were constantly hitting refresh or clicking on other pages when they got error messages …..which throws the page hits through the roof.

Here is what he had to say:

It is noted and very frustrating. Can you imagine the work I put into it to have this happen? We were getting hit with so much traffic that we were scaling to almost 100 servers at one point. The rumor front page is designed to help ease the servers. We had 1.3 million times when people did get through yesterday. We tried every trick in the book and spent thousands of dollars for those key hours between noon and three when we were getting hit thousands of times a second. More than any other hockey site on the web according to our servers.We truly appreciate the loyalty that many of you have shown to the site, and if you weren’t among the 1.3 million who got through we are sorry. It does suck.
Each year we can afford to ramp it up a little more. so hopefully be July 1 we will be better.

as for anyone who feels that the rest of the year we don’t give you at least twenty bucks worth of entertainment. just email me.
 
On the absolutely stupid post involving Montreal about to make a big splash he defends himself, note how he does a little name dropping…truely pathetic (e5):

sorry you feel that way, but I was told the Habs were in on something and remember Spezza and the Oilers this summer. I promise you that one. The fact of the matter is I am proud that we created a great place for hockeyfans to talk with one another. I think our community is among the most intelligent out there and they drive me to be as good as I can be.
I have discussed this with Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com, who has a very similar intelligent, tough group that he deals with every day.

He then threw out some hogwash about why the major networks like TSN were breaking the trades before him….which I fail to understand how it explains why 97% of his rumors BEFORE this deadline were pure fabricated garbage?  I especially love how he comments on the blown deals reported by the networks…. talk about the pot calling the kettle black!:

It was a tough deadline. You are not exactly going to break trades when the NHL Network is reporting directly from the trade center? How many times did you hear the expression, “Pending the trade call” yesterday. You know why? Because in the past TSN would of course be able to wait and break a deal after the trade call due to their relationships with the NHL. They would get the faxes right after the trade call… Obviously there is big money in trade day and TSN has big money in the NHL so of course they help each other out. As they should.
That is another reason why we saw some blown “done deals” yesterday by the networks. To break a trade you HAD to jump the call. And that is risky. Believe me, I know.

And finally he toots his own horn and explains the few trades he actually did get right…although he lies about  reporting Antropov to NYR  (he had 12 other teams though on his site) and he also didnt get the Cole trade (he reported Cole for Ruutu specifically):

We kept you abreast of the Guerin story, the Tkachuk story and the Jay Bo/ Flyers story every step of the way…if you could get in yesterday it was blow by blow.. In the weeks leading up were among the first to report the rumours of Jokinen to Calgary, Cole to Carolina, Antropov to the NY Rangers. And I was pushing Jokinen to Calgary from Monday on.

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