Snowballs

I think anyone who's worked on some backstage aspect of a production knows the nature of the "snowball". What starts out as a simple-looking task that will take a short while to accomplish begins to demonstrate a remarkable reluctance to allow easy completion.

Suddenly the right tool for the job isn't to hand and you find yourself improvising. Fixing one thing breaks another. Taking a little off one leg of the chair makes it wobble in the opposite direction. The beautiful painting you've just hung centre stage to acclaim from cast, crew, designer and director clashes horribly with curtains.

Or a simple upgrade to the website results in a hundred and one little things that need to be tweaked and fixed.

:-) 

Okay, simple isn't even an understatement. There was nothing simple about this. It has been a complete and major re-working of every aspect of the site with only underlying information being retained.

None of this has been helped by the hammering we've received recently from an army of zombie PCs attempting to flood the site with comments promoting porn sites or the persistent attentions of a Ukrainian referrer spammer who managed not only to take this site down repeatedly but a number of other very high profile sites as well.

If you've had difficulty getting in or found the site very slow, my apologies, but you may have noticed anything from 70-590 visitors attempting to access the site all at the same time.  Approximately 20-30 of those are legitimate at any one time. The rest of them have been the aforesaid spammers making our lives unpleasant. Eventually their attentions will turn elsewhere as they discover they're not making any progress in their efforts to peddle their trash. But meanwhile I'm afraid we all suffer the consequences of the proliferation of 'net crims.

To cap it all off for me personally, we discovered on the weekend that we've a serious termite infestation in our house. So the next three to six months and tens of thousands of dollars will have to be spent eradicating the buggers and patching the damage that they've done.

:-\ 

Never rains but it pours! 

Meanwhile I'll continue to work at the many issues that have been raised with the new site and the (literally!) hundreds of requests for assistance whenever I can. In the hope that some day soon, I might actually be able to use this blog for something theatre related!

Finally, if you've read this far, my thought for the day:

VOTE!! There are a couple of hundred people using their logins very regularly, usually a few dozen per day. But no-one seems to be voting much. If you read a topic on the boards or see an event that takes your fancy, please Add your Vote. Your votes determine what appears on the site's home page, so make them work!

:-)

Cheers
Grant