I had a chance to video with Jot for about an hour Monday night and tried to share some of our concerns about the degradation of the site over the past year, the slow-downs, the weird problems that pop up, etc. I want to share some of that with our loyal pards here, because I know we all get frustrated at bugs. So here's sortof a summary of a very wide-ranging discussion!

1. Jot will end his insane coursework schedule for his doctorate this summer,. He's still got oral examinations and a thesis to write, but he feels that the worst in terms of his time being totally committed elsewhere may lighten up SOMEWHAT (after 2 1/2 years). He has docketed July for a month to try to do some serious revamping of the site, including archiving and other actions which may help us with the site being so slow, by moving things around and possibly dealing with the images galleries in a way to tighten and speed things up.

2. No, he can't just appoint a new demi to "do the maintenance." His description of just how long it would take for them even to learn how the system is run, and who is the person who would do that for free, and who would be the person who would have the time to TEACH that person how the system is set up, even before a thing could be done in terms of recoding the site, let alone trying to do it through emails or telephone calls - well, you get the idea. He noted that HIRING someone won't work either - we could pay the entire site income to a handler on code and it would still be about 1/5 of what they could make in the real world, even if such a remarkable person could be found.

3. We talked at length about the dissatisfactions of so many members with the slowdowns and lack of new features, and at least he is aware of that in a way I'm not sure he was before. There's still an amazing quality of loyalty however. I was surprised, however, to learn that we have not lost members after this nasty past bug-ridden year; it's at about the same. That's amazing but it also shows we KNOW there's no real other source for ancient history communities ;)

4. We talked at length about why we get those weird slowdowns and "bug runs" and he's pretty much explored what he can think of. The idea of bot crawlers (particularly bots crawling our image galleries) is something over which we have no control, but he's contacted our server people, who have put a SWAT team on our ongoing problems. He is rather hoping they can figure out where these issues come from, as everything he's investigated hasn't really shown where the problem is sourcing from.

Jot hasn't lost interest in the site at all - he loves the site. He's also had two years from hell, scheduling wise, but hopes things will improve somewhat after July. He IS aware of our concerns and will try to do what is possible to address them. It cheered ME up - and I hope it will you too!