Dear Leader Speaks

By now many of you are already aware of what happened when our site went down for about a day and a half. On Thursday afternoon Gizmodo linked to one of our posts, and we instantly got a huge spike in traffic. And while I had previously predicted the need to move to a better hosting solution, we couldn’t have predicted that this would happen. Because we were still using an inexpensive shared hosting plan, when all that Gizmodo traffic came our way we suddenly exceeded our allotted percentage of the server’s resources and they suspended our account.

Right away we moved to a much better (and more expensive) virtual server, but unfortunately our old host’s backup of our database was badly corrupted. Thanks to the legendary heroism of your fellow Crasstalker Bens, we were able to save all the data and get the site back up. From now on we should have a much faster website with fewer annoying bugs and less downtime. This will be a big improvement in how Crasstalk performs.

We think this is a huge opportunity for us to continue growing this community. Here’s what you can do to help us do that:

• Share Crasstalk links on Facebook,  Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. All you have to do is hit one of the social media buttons at the bottom of each article.
• Join the Crasstalk Facebook Group.
• If you haven’t already, make a donation to our site fund. See the button on the right? Yeah, that one.
• If you’re an author, start writing new articles again. We’re going to need them!
• Go find articles mentioning the Gawker redesign and post comments with links to the site in them. That’s how many of you found this place, so keep spreading the word.

I’ll tell you right now, DogsOfWar, GrandInquisitor and I have big plans for this place. We’re working on improving the quality level of the articles. We’re making the site faster. And we’re working on adding new features like PMs, Gawker-style reply notifications and chat. This recent setback has made us more, not less, committed to improving the site.

Stay snarky.