Well, we are approaching the end of the first day of COPA 2.0. We started with a soft-launch on Thursday, when I started trying to pursuade some of our more active posters to come over and take a look. We made the cutover at 10:30pm Friday night. At every step of course in a project like this you hit unexpected snags. I gave Couto Solutions the word to change the web address and told the Board it was happening. Then they called me back to tell me that our old ISP would not allow us to switch to a new site, so we had to scramble for a way to make it work. The result was we 'redirected' the traffic, which is why you see the URL's of our site once you are in say 'live.cirruspilots.org' rather than 'www.cirruspilots.org'. Well, we'll get that fixed soon enough.
Rising this morning at 7am to see what the damages were, we found the site running well and only a couple of requests for passwords. That was my big worry, whether we were clear enough on how to get a new password and if it would work. That came through with flying colors, so we decided to turn the heat up. Tim Gieseler, master of mailing lists (in addition to his master of content and other general masteries) took the entire 2900 member COPA mailing list and sent out a blast announcing the new site around midday. That led to a huge surge of people hitting the site. At the peak I saw over 60 members on simultaneously, around double what the old site was typically handling, and things seem to be holding up fine.
The new membership system seems to be working; I've had a few trouble reports but haven't been able to track down any specifics, but in the meantime we have had a number of renewals go through, and we have had several new members join, including a CFI at the new non-owner rate and a member joining with a 2 year membership.
So, we are continuing to watch things, uncrossing a few fingers but keeping some in reserve, and probably going to catch a little time off too. Enjoy the new site!
Posted
23 Aug 2008 16:53
by
Curtis Sanford