Some of you have noticed a new admin and asked about his role. When I rejoined CC last summer, it was clear that even though I have some technical knowledge, it just wasn’t up to snuff for the challenges of a large forum. We discussed at the time changing our web host. In particular, we needed a host with experience running our forum software, Discourse. We needed to be ready for our two big seasons of traffic: EA/ED decisions in December and regular admission in March.
If you remember from the fall, we had a variety of failures that sometime prevented users from accessing the site at all. At the time we were still in conversations with hosting companies and hadn’t made any changes. But the severity of the problems meant we needed some expert help immediately. We were referred to @CC_Jay, who has had many years of experience managing forums that use our software.
The first thing he helped us with was migrating to a new version of our database. But he’s been advising us on other technical issues surrounding hosting. Recently he made a change to allow us to do some updates without downtime. He also changed our infrastructure so that we can adjust to spikes in activity. Additionally, he works with our developers on updates they are working on.
The funny thing is that now that we have an expert, we don’t need to change our web host. Over time CC_Jay (AKA, pfaffman) has become a part of the team. He’s a Discourse consultant with other clients, so he may be more or less involved over time. But at CC, we are incredibly grateful for his assistance and I personally sleep better knowing his work has helped us provide a stable service.