Update on the Site

[brenden]

Hey everyone,

Just giving you a full explanation on what's going on as I've really only posted small bits and pieces across Facebook and different boards in the past week or so.

Essentially, the site was quite slow the night before the English exam, and then I drove some traffic to the blog and to the English discussion boards through email and Facebook and we ended up with quite a lot of traffic and quite a lot of slowness with some errors, etc. Obviously, this was very bad and became our number one priority. The issue was that the server couldn't cope with the sustained amount of traffic that was occurring organically as well as through email openings and Facebook clicks. So the solution was to change the server.

We did that over the weekend (and we now use the same host as Netflix~~), so the traffic problem has been fixed, but upon changing the server we accrued the bug that you've been experiencing this week, which is what's giving constant errors and what have you.

So, we've been working through the weekend and through the beginning of this week trying to fix the bug. We have our usual web developer and two other people who I'm told are specialists (whatever that means) working on it trying to find the problem. From what I can understand, once the problem is actually found it's a somewhat easy fix. However, finding the problem is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack - hard to estimate how long it will take, but easy enough to pick the needle up once you've found it.   

At 7pm or so today we took the site crash and we put up an interim site. The interim site had no data from the past two days, but I'm happy to tell you that all of those posts are back up. Posts made on the 'interim' site, so between about 7pm and 8pm, will have been lost, which was expected.

If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's that once the bug gets fixed and the new server can do its job properly, ATAR Notes will be quicker and more stable than it ever has been. I do apologise for how blatantly annoying the site has been to used. I'm obviously not using it as much as Year 12s are at the moment, but it's driving me bonkers, so I can't imagine how upsetting it must be for some of you. The patience your exhibiting has our gratitude, that's for sure.

Thanks sincerely for your patience and understanding everyone. We honestly are working around the clock to restore the site to the stability and speed that you've come to expect.

Please feel free to email me at the email in my signature  and if I don't get back to you tonight, I'll definitely get back to you tomorrow when I'm back in the office.

- Ned Nerb.