hardfork19 ?

Poloniex

Poloniex has come in for some criticism lately... for a while. All kinds of rumours and theories about DDOS at sensitive trading times when huge market dumps mean traders on the platform missed out on equally huge sales / profits ! Some suspicious minded people have put their recent problems down to over stretched resources and memes abound about them upgrading their raspberry pi, arduino servers, etc are indeed hilarious if a bit worrying (no smoke without fire / throw enough poop some of it sticks.)

Coin Suspensions

Coin suspensions have largely been put down to forks and glitches with individual coins, but hf19 & SBD / Steem suspension does seem a little bit convenient considering this weeks surprise bounty. My 8SBD has all but disappeared. One way to deal with it is to just power up everything and or / wait for NVO / EtBits to come onstream.

Trollbox Abolished

Just recently the trollbox disappeared on Poloniex in favour of more support staff. The box was getting a bit FUD Madness to be honest and a lot of yellow cards and indeed red cards were being issued. (Ihonedstly don't know how anyone can process 100 comments per minute? )

Also there were a lot of angry people constantly harassing the mod box about support tickets not being answered at all or resolved for going on weeks, (people giving up) & it was obviously, particularly about withdrawals. A lot of troll box user accusations of their thoughts that it was all fixed, they were maybe going bust or simply not able to cope, put this important part of the blockchain market under extreme strain and may partly explain why they chose to shut this pandora's box of worms.

So the box went. Poloniex have largely seemed to keep quiet about all the problems ( the best or most foolish PR strategy ?) and one assumes they are trying to address the issues. They have a very lucrative business.

INCREDIBLY SUPER BUSY

They suddenly went from super busy to INCREDIBLY SUPER BUSY in a matter of a couple of months and when you consider how much trade volume, it's easy to see how they could have been caught out by sluggish systems and bitcoin beginning to chug slow

SO ! hardfork 19 came and I dropped $8 in to poloniex.. it would usually appear instantly and 10 hours went by. I opened a ticket.. (still no answer as yet) then I had a further look and deposit / withdrawals for SBD and STEEM suspended.

source = @mindhunter

Penny Dropping ? (pardon the pun)

By now I'm thinking you guys are f*cked or this is a dodgeball . They know / knew hardfork19 could / would bring a lot of activity. So have they a) slumped under the weight while the Matrix resets or is this b) further evidence that Poloniex is using unorthodox practices to someone's (not yours or mine's) benefit. I'd like to think they're just not able to cope with the volume and the hardfork implications.

INFO

Any information on this would be appreciated. I even asked a friendly steembod if they knew anything about it. All they could tell me was it definitely went through to Poloniex steem account and my memo was correct ! have you seen the poloniex wallet on steemit ? you could run a government department on it ! Perhaps if Poloniex actually maintained a steemit presence I wouldn't have to waste all evening posting this !

ANY INFORMATION about the hang' would be useful.. links in replies will be gladly accepted if you find anything out. I won't be giving away $10,000 rewards but I may be persuaded for a token $2 or 3 or more depending on the quality of the information / response

Advice Given

@mindhunter said don't trust poloniex... as have others. I always kept an open mind as it's really easy to use and generally I hadn't had any problems before.. I was going to anyway but I took his advise an opened at bittrex.. After getting used to it's very different interface ! I'm loving it actually even thought volumes and trades are smaller it's nice and fast.

https://imgur.com/srvobWd

Future Options

I just wonder if the DECENTRALISED NVO will be a better option ? once it's established.. It won't be based in the USA ! The Crowdsale has 5 days to go if you want 50% of the fees in your own back pocket.. ok a very smal percentage of 50% of the fees but if it takes up Poloniex slack, it might equate a minimum wage ;)