In Standardbred Canada’s effort to provide you with timely and accurate information regarding the issues that have caused disruption and outages to the website over the past several weeks, here is the latest report.

As has been mentioned the website required major updates to the Content Management System as the software that was in place was no longer supported which threatened the website with security issues that could not be fixed or repaired if something was to happen to the programming of the website.  

Further, it was not an option to just update the software on the back end and leave the front end — what the users see and interact with — alone due to programming and coding changes between the different versions of the Content Management System. However, with that said, the front-end changes to the website are being assessed and tweaked thanks to user feedback which we are tracking and monitoring on a daily basis.  

One area that has been addressed since the new website launched is the Horses For Sale (HFS) Board. This past Monday based on your feedback we have revised the look of the HFS Board homepage to a “list display” that we hope users, sellers and buyers find more user-friendly. In addition to the list format, we have made changes to improve the mobile version of the HFS Board, and have added additional sorting functions for a more engaging experience for buyers.

These changes were based on your feedback, and more changes are forthcoming to further improve your experience.

Still, the major concern that SC is working through is what is referred to as a “deadlock issue” which causes pages and the website to appear unavailable during peak periods when the website is being used.

SC has been working with a third party to identify and repair the root cause of these deadlocks and is of the highest priority for the association.  Unfortunately, it is a very complicated matter when dealing with millions of lines of coding, but we are committed to resolving this as soon as possible.

Should you receive an error message reading "The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later" a workaround could be to wait 10-15 seconds, then hit the refresh button or try to reload the page. This process should load the page.  If you ever encounter the error again, please repeat this method.

We're also offering free TrackIT links to entries and results for users experiencing disruptions with the Entries and Results pages.

We are working extremely long and hard on resolving these issues and will provide you with ongoing updates as progression is made.  

Once again, we apologize for these problems and thank you for your patience during this time.