Greetings!
As you are probably aware, we've had some issues with the website during the month of May (and some of April). By the time you read this, I hope these issues have been resolved. For
clarification I thought I'd give you a summary of the issues. I'll try not to get too technical, and I apologize if I fail in that endeavor.
In mid-April our hosting provider had problems with our server. They retired it and moved us to a new server, which is more advanced and less lenient of the older code we use. Some problems became visible over the next few weeks - things that weren't a problem before were now screaming for attention. For instance, one of our webpages used to be very useful but no longer is, and it doesn't play well with the new server’s settings. The result was repeated crashes for no apparent reason, until we finally got answers and guidance from the hosting provider. That page has now been removed and has stopped crashing the website, but that pointed out a different server setting which needed to be tweaked. Changing that server setting drew our attention to another part of the site which was causing trouble. We think we have all of the band-aids appropriately applied, but it has become clear that we need to revise the code - the website has been updated over the years, but the base level of the code has been largely unchanged since 2007 and the changes in technology have caught up to us. We are in the process of doing this update.
There is a new website - a whole new website, with brand new code - waiting in the wings, but it will be waiting for a little while yet.
Beyond all of these problems, we're still consolidating user profiles on the website. The last step (and the largest) will be to finish compiling a list of all of the users who don't have a group, and to send that list to the Seneschals and Chatelaines to dig through. We'd like everyone to have a home, even if it's just 'Northshield.' (Yes, you can select the branch of 'Northshield' when you edit your profile.)
Again, my apologies for the outages.
In service,
Abelard