I want to apologize for the terrible experience many of you had with notifications and search since Friday afternoon. As you have noticed, the problem has been fixed so we are back where we were last week. I’m personally mortified this happened. On top of everything else, it prevented me from seeing my notifications as well. If I haven’t responded to you, there’s a good chance I just missed the notification.
Something I learned at my previous job is when something goes wrong to ask why five times. This is natural to me (ask my parents!) and so I did the same thing this time:
- Notifications and search were broken.
- Why?—Untested code was released on the site.
- Why?—The company that manages hosting made a mistake.
[* Why?—We’ve been pushing them to make changes to both our test site and the site the community is using, which caused confusion. - Why?—We are trying to implement features like the forum index so that we can fix navigation problems.
- Why?—Last year a new theme broke navigation patterns.
Part of me is glad the problem is mostly not my fault. But the other part of the me realizes it’s still my responsibility. Perhaps we need to be more clear in our communication with our hosting company. Maybe we need to slow down work so that just the high impact changes (such as the index) are released. Those things could help in the short term, but if we want to solve our problems with site usability, we need a more sustainable solution.
Starting this week, a group of College Confidential developers are building a version of the site where we can test changes without needing help from the hosting company. When that’s in place, we can make sure only tested code is implemented on the site. I wouldn’t normally talk about this sort of behind-the-scenes thing, but I felt it’s important to let you know that we take the disruption you all observed very seriously. I can’t promise it won’t happen again, but can assure you we are doing what’s in our power to prevent this sort of problem in the future.
Once again, I’m sorry this happened, that it took so long to fix and that we didn’t do more to prevent this type of error. I can only hope you will give us a chance to re-earn your trust.