MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT
What Happened
We need your help: http://www.l-word.com/support.php
Around May 6, we started to experience issues with the old version of L-word.com. That site was ancient – it hadn’t been updated in years. We’re not talking about the appearance, but the infrastructure. For example, the forum software we were using was replaced by the company in 2008. We were unable to upgrade it because it was dovetailed with our homegrown fanfic archive. It would have required extensive changes to the archive - and extensive expense.
Instead, we have been developing for the past 18 months an entirely new archive that would give writers and readers a tremendously better experience based on an infrastructure that could constantly be updated, keeping our servers and your computers safe.
When we started having crashes from May 6 – 7, we decided to bring you the new site – even though it was incomplete. We thought it would be smarter to put “fixes” into the new rather than the old site.
Except we ran into two types of problems: 1) denial of server attacks and 2) error codes. The error codes kept crashing the site.
On Thursday night, we took the new site offline until we could get the error codes fixed.
On Sunday night, May 12, we put the “old” site back online (we got it working) until we are ready with the “new” site. When we’re ready with the new site, we’ll put up a notice on http://fanfiction.l-word.com giving the writers a few hours’ notice of the time we will close down the site to convert to the new site. In those hours, the new site will get all the most recent stories moved to it. When the new site opens, it will have all the comments and stories that the old site had when it was shut down.
Also, the new site will have the second archive: Femslash.
In the meantime, we strongly encourage you to help us out if you can. We just lost a week of ad revenue. We’ve never charged anyone to use any part of our site. We appreciate your voluntary support: http://www.l-word.com/support.php
Thank you. |
