Sock drawers

Responses to the new website have been... mixed.

A few have responded very enthusiastically while some other responses have bordered on abusive. But then, I know how I would feel if someone wandered into my living room and rearranged the furniture while I was out and in a way that's what the redevelopment of the site has been like for many.

Since 2002 the site has remained very static. Even the change at the start of that year was largely cosmetic, with most of the underlying functionality remaining identical. The last significant change to the website was in late 1999 when the audience was a fraction of the size it is today and people were significantly less entrenched in their views.

So, after inviting this site into their homes and offices for the last four years and knowing where to find the things they want, how things are laid out, it's been disruptive to discover that someone's been fossicking in the sock drawer and mixed things up.

If it aint "brocken" suggested one correspondent, don't fix it. Sadly the answer, as many were aware, was that the site as it was, was indeed broken. In growing to be one of the largest  theatre portals in the world, it had become unwieldy and unmanageable with many niggly and annoying bugs that were preventing the community that had grown around the website from realising its full potential.

There were countless broken links, old companies and duplicate events. The audition list on the home page was becoming unmanageable as contributors flooded the list with audition notices every day of the week for weeks on end.

Confusion over personal logins and passwords and company passwords reigned supreme. Most people weren't aware of the frequent regular requests I was fielding from people who found it all too much and need to be led gently towards how best to get their company's information published on the website. With 1400 companies listed and many of them changing the staff or volunteers responsible for updating their information a few times per year, it was proving difficult to keep up. 

Younger enthusiasts kept returning to ancient topics to add "Me too!" messages over and over again to desparate pleas to be given starring roles. Occasional flare-ups and abuse lowered the general tone of the discussion with no ready way for the community to respond or deal with this, other than ignore it and hope that things would subside or the really abusive individuals would go away.

Spammers and scammers had begun to flourish on the net and their drivel was appearing on a daily basis. Only the night before we switched over to the new site a spammer somewhere out there started flooding the site using a program that posted messages every few seconds to the website. Between 9pm and 7am this productive individual had succeeded in adding more than 1500 messages to the site about a range of products and services that were... well, utterly unrelated to theatre.

Was it "brocken"? Sure was.

Is it fixed?

I guess the jury's out. Time will tell.

In the meantime, please do keep the responses coming in. Positive and negative. Not one of the responses to date hasn't offered me some indication of something that couldn't be improved or fixed. And with the new site in place, I'm in a much better position to manage those changes and to share some of the load of managing this burgeoning community with others.

Oh, and much as the feedback form is intended for suggestions and comments, at this early stage, these are probably best added to the New website problems topic created by Na. That way people can check what has and hasn't been reported as an issue and I'm not having to respond to multiple messages from various areas on the same topic.

Thanks!