System faster now, and more announcements.

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Hi all,

First of all allow me to personally apologize for the state that this has been in for too long now. Even with the little time I had, I could have done more. I guess have a problem motivating myself if I know I cannot make something perfect.

Secondly, I have the pleasure of announcing a long-needed and overdue hardware upgrade which happened today and which should have made things much faster for everyone. I certainly notice a dramatic speed increase. More and faster processors are a Good Thing (tm).

Thirdly, and probably most importantly: Since I was so frustrated with being so time-constrained that I was not able to deliver perfection, I have taken the liberty to silently hire someone else to take care of the site full-time. Flar (username "Flar") had her first day at work today. I've had the opportunity to work with her on previous occasions, and I can tell you that she is one capable professional young woman. She'll need a little time to get rolling, but she and I will soon be managing the migration the system to yet better hardware, switching from phpBB to vBulletin, creating a new structure, cleaning up the ftp site and migrating the wiki to Mediawiki. She will then take care of daily moderation of the forums and all the other daily and weekly tasks that go with properly maintaining this site.

Fourthly, we will in future have ads. I don't like ads much, but there's simply no way around it if we want to make this thing rock again. We get quite a bit of money in donations. (Thank You! You pulled us through even when we did not deserve it...). But even if donations were to increase significantly after the upcoming improvements, they will still never pay for the combined costs of hardware, colo, bandwidth and Flar's salary. We will (ofcourse) make sure the ads are never of the in-your-face, moving-over-the-content, audio-at-full-volume kind, and we will most certainly not dare to have ads until the rest of the house is much, much, much more in order than it is now.


For now, feel free to fantasize about what XDA-developers could be, since we will now have both the machine-power and woman-power to do something with these ideas.


Peter Poelman
(who is looking forward to spending some more time with y'all soon)

Thanks for the post, keeping us updated - it is very highly appreciated

I can understand what you mean with finding it hard to get motivated when you know you can't reach the level of perfection that you'd like, so thanks for keeping up the good work anyway

Re: System faster now, and more announcements.

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Originally Posted by Peter Poelman

(who is looking forward to spending some more time with y'all soon)

Thanks Peter for the system update - we all look forward to seeing you and your expertise

Was wondering why I couldn't log on earlier... This is great now! Thanks Peter!

one word : THANKS

Thank you very much Peter :lol:

This really *is* fast now, thanks a lot!

much quicker now !

Thanks

Its a lot quicker, and I don't mind Google ads if you wanna use them :P I know how painful it is to run a site with no money!

btw, it seems that the database, which had some hickups before, now can't stand the speed of the site. I get frequent phpBB messages about failed DB connections. It only gets annoying when you press the submit button after writing a lot of text