I just sent an email out to most everyone. Some of you got it last night, some of you got it this morning. I wanted to take this opportunity to reach out and let everyone know that we've made some important changes to things around the guild.
A while back we moved away from GoDaddy to DreamHost, and things have been up and down since then. We've grown faster than our hosting could handle things, and that caused a degraded user experience. Page load times were slower, the home page was almost unresponsive, and there were frequent server errors.
What we've done to alleviate these issues is move to a new server with more dedicated resources that we can adjust as traffic and content requires. We've also added a faster and more powerful search engine to our forums. We've identified and fixed a caching error that was causing extraordinarily long load times for the home page. And lastly, we've installed some server tweaks that improve the caching of server side code.
Aside from performance improvements we've also cleaned up some of the sites color inconsistencies, and made the interface more consistent. We've been working on making the Cartographers' Guild homepage more than just a forgotten entity that users will bypass by bookmarking the forums. While this transition isn't fully complete, we've already formed plans to do a larger push on the news front that will make user generated content more visible on the home page. News posts, spotlighted tutorials, choice maps, blog entries, and general community info will become more prevalent and pushed more often to the home page. There will also be a bit more involvement with our social networking pages and the homepage as we begin to push community info from the forums to the social networks and vice versa.
We're still growing and we're still the best mapping community on the internet. If you have been on the site lately, especially during our troubled times, I'd like to personally apologize and assure you we're definitely back in action.
If you need to reset your password you can do so at this link:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/login.php?do=lostpw
Thank you so much for your time!
Sincerely,
Robbie Powell
Administrator