All,

My server is under serious stress when it comes to sending emails. I may even limit the number of emails sent in the next few rounds as a result. In order to curb this going forward, all users that have received a Wii, please unsubscribe to aid in others receiving their emails faster. To unsubscribe from emails visit this page and follow the directions:
http://www.nowinstock.net/unsubscribeAlert.php

Thank you and others thank you as well!

Justin

Yeah, it just so happened that I was working on the site at the time that alert went out and my code was screwed up for that one. I fixed it and all is good again.

Justin

All,

I think it is evident I have yet to master this site management stuff yet. I am working on getting this resolved as soon as I can. I will be working on it over the weekend. Hopefully by the end of next week I will have the site running smooth again when stock arrives and emails blast out. I am in totally unfamiliar territory here, and believe me, when the site goes down, I feel embarrassed and panicked. I am trying my best to get emails out as soon as I can. I am trying to optimize the site as best I can. But, when you have thousands of people on your site at once, my server doesn’t like it.

Please be assured that over the next week I will be working with some very experienced people to help resolve the issues. This weekend I will review all of my code for the 20th time to ensure optimal speed. When stock arrives, I am FREAKING OUT to keep this site running , just like all of you are when trying to get the products you want!

As you can tell Sear’s does have stock showing.

But I think we are bringing the site down just like all my email sending is bringing my site down! Good luck to all!

Well, I am never sure how many are ever available, but it appears Toy R Us was showing stock available in the early morning hours EST. I got the text myself, woke up, and ran to the computer to enter the URL. Sure enough, the tracker was right. Some have already mentioned they got one, but a lot of you said you didn’t. Not much I can say here other than maybe it was a release of canceled orders from a few days back just as Sears usually does. I assume this cause it doesn’t sound like there were that many.

With the last Friday release of stock at Amazon, I have not heard a bad word about the mobile alerts. It also seems that the mobile alerts are being delivered quicker than most emails, which is not surprising to me.

As a result of this success, I am releasing the mobile alerts from the Beta label into released. I will now begin adding more stores to the mix, but there will still be limited number on the list. Only the best and most widely accepted stores will be on the list. I will release a list of these stores on the mobile alerts instructions page as well as place icons on the Wii tracker page next to each store included in the mobile alerts. Expect these changes to be noted over the next week.

UPDATE: The server transition has COMPLETED. You CAN once again subscribe to email alerts.

As you may have noticed, the mobile alerts for the Wii are a Beta test at this time. As I state on the Mobile Alerts sign up page, this means that alerts are limited to only a few stores. The only stores that get distributed over the mobile alerts airwaves are Amazon, Best Buy, and Circuit City. I removed Sears from this list when they had their stock issues. If they behave tomorrow, I may add them back.

Since I put the mobile alerts option live, I have accrued about 400+ people following the alerts. I like this and want it to continue. But, what I really want is one of the above stores to release some stock for one last test run. In the initial tests there were some people, including myself, that were not receiving every alert. This is not good, but something we may just have to deal with going forward. I tried to diagnos the problem, but there is no clear answer as to what is causing the issue. All I know is that it is not on my end as every alert is sent to my Twitter account just fine. I have opened a bug report with Twitter in hopes of getting some indication as to why this happens, but response has been lackluster at best.

Once the next alert goes out via mobile, I should get enough feedback from users to understand just how bad the situation is and will decide how to proceed accordingly. So all users that are subscribing to mobile alerts, on the next alert, please come back to the News section here to look for a poll or something so I can better understand how broad the problem really is.

As I am sure a lot of you have noticed, Walmart has been suffering from history anxiety and want their name to dominate my Recent History for the Wii tracker. No, seriously though, this is what I call Walmart Flux. They have the stock, but it just disappears for some unknown reason only to come back and show as in stock a minute or ten later. This happened last year as well, hence why I have already given it a name.

So what should you do? Hang out on the Walmart site and just continue to hit refresh every minute or so. If you do this for 20 minutes and still see no stock, look back at my Wii tracker to see if I saw any during that time. If not, you might want to give it a rest. If I did see stock while you were refreshing there, then you might want to go back and try again for a little while. This is the best I can do for you. I am sure Walmart Flux will continue throughout the holiday season and probably longer. Just another web site glitch we have to deal with just like Sears and their inventory issues.

Just letting all of you know that, yes, Sam’s Club did have Wii’s in stock. I am doing this so that all of you will trust the tracker. There has been some dissent sent my way from people saying that my tracker is crap. Trust me, if there is an error with one of my scripts, I will surely admit it and post the error here.

Screen shot from Sam’s Club showing stock was available:

And once more, hang in there! I know the frustration can be great.