Cleaning out my engineering office cube I found old technology: a Sony Discman, floppy disks of various sizes, a card for dial up access numbers while on business trips. In our basement is a Betamax VCR and a VHS player, and a box full of old laptops, cables, connectors, and other peripheral equipment. Debris, junk, or historical artifacts depending on one's viewpoint.
Here in the Rain we've seen a lot of changes in the 18+ years we've been here. Leadership and ownership have changed more than once, and while visibility from management isn't what it once was, I know there's someone out there still keeping the lights on (Thanks Ben!).
Sometimes ActiveRain still has glitches, but I'm a pragmatist and recognize that most of today's hiccups are in the category of "First World problems".
If you've been around the Rain for some time, you've lived through:
- Complete site outages that might last the better part of a day and continue on and off for days.
- A 50/50 chance a Raincoated Chihuahua would appear on your next click
- A complete breakdown in linkages due to ownership changes
- Destroyed SEO due to ownership changes
- An inability to create new posts
- A month's worth of blog posts that went POOF (but were eventually restored)
- Spam comments on posts that were literally in the 100s (alphabet spammer, may your keyboard have broken forever!)
- More spam profiles than legit profiles
- Posts that went POOF as soon as you clicked Submit (there's a reason to this day I still do a COPY before clicking Submit).
Now compare that to present day and what's the worst I typically have to deal with?
Site slowness? We're so used to everything now, now, now, even a little slowness feels like FOREEEEEEVVVVVVER doesn't it?
A rare spammer comment. ARMS seems to get about 99.99% of everything before we ever get a chance to see it.
The occasional Raincoat Chihuahua, which Refresh usually seems to correct.
Multiple notifications for the same event, I actually prefer that over no notifications.
No visible ownership? We've got members that have picked up the banner and continued the culture (Zoom meetings, tutorials, challenges). Maybe some day we'll have a Community Manager again, but if we don't, I feel confident the site culture will continue.
The overall positivity and willingness to share keeps me coming back daily, and knowing where we've been makes present day glitches easier to bear. We know the Development Team and Support continue to make improvements, some visible, some not so visible.
One constant from past to present, if you need help, just ask.
Until next Tuesday,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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