Wow, what a wonderful and exciting year it's been! Lots of new faces, new captions, new drawings, and even a new home for stories!
The last year has brought us a few trials as well, as many are aware, I had to step away for a time last winter due to a personal crisis, trusting my Admin team to hold the fort while I dealt with other issues away from the Haven, only able to visit sporadically during that time. Sara, Crystal, Cassandra, Robyn, and bhu all deserve a hand for the extra time and effort they put in during my absence.
This July we faced possibly the end of our site when our host informed me our traffic was too high to contiune using a shared server, and our estimated annual costs more than trippled. But others saw this as a problem well worth solving, and many jumped to send what they could to help us out, but one individual decided to do as much as she could to help by creating a fundraiser so those that might not normally be able to donate for whatever reason could do something as simple as making a caption to certain criteria and have a donation made in there name. Courtney's Caption Challenge took off immediately, and is a huge reason why currently we have a comfortable amount banked to cover our future expenses! She has led three Caption Challenges thus far with the help of a few friends, and she does plan to have more! For more information on Courtney's Caption Challenges click here.
On a high note, four additional Smartgroups as well as one hundred and forty two Yahoo! Groups have been added to the Gallery's archive as part of my Save the Work Project. To find out more about the save the work project click here.
Today, Rachel's Haven expands it's features list as the doors of the Library open to the public. The interface for the Library is like no others in the genre thus far, and we like to think it's a bit more user friendly, but that's up to you to judge! To learn more about the new Library click here.
Rachel's Haven became carbon neutral! Our host company, at the behest of many account holders as well as their internal leadership committed to only buying energy from renewable resources to power everything for the company. As soon as it was official, I added a new icon to the bottom of each page, publicly declaring our Green status for all to see!
I will only make one promise today about our future developments toward the site, but in this case, I think it's what many have been finding frustration with recently. Rachel's Haven has been experiencing many slow downs in the past few months, load times have climbed faster than the space shuttle at times, and I do find it unacceptable. That is why the next big focus will be on turning this problem around, mainly through the efforts of my wonderful tech team. They already have a few theories as to what is causing it, and now they are ready to dig in and solve this for everyone! Obviously this isn't the only thing under development, but it is and will remain at the top of the list until I am satisfied with the load times, and I do like to think I have high standards!
And now, for those who just want to see the numbers, I have the statistics for Rachel's Haven as of 12:00 am PST on October 3, 2008. For those that want to compare them to our statistics from last year, click here to find them.
Forum Stats
Total Members: 2460
Total Posts: 110557
Total Topics: 11616
Average registrations per day: 12.94
Average posts per day: 156.79
Average topics per day: 16.2
Total Boards: 261
Gallery Stats
Files: 53324
Albums: 3493
Categories: 187
Comments: 10006
Times viewed: 978240
Library Stats