There are a few things for me to respond to here.

1. The server instability. We are still making changes and trying to work our way around this. We've actually increased server capacity over the past few days which I was hoping would sort of stop the bleeding from an ongoing attempt to bring our servers down. Unfortunately it just means it takes longer to bring the servers down.

I've also been investigating the logs to try and find the attack vector, which admittedly is not my greatest ability. I think I found it last night and pushed a code change (but I can't announce things like that, because if I'm right they see that I've found out and move on to something else, and if I'm wrong we get mocked and probably more attacks) that I think plugs a hole. You've probably noticed a new timer that popped up, and we've noticed some improvement there.

Unfortunately when it comes to things like our servers being under attack (and they still are, as evidence by the stupid cloudflare "under attack" still being enabled, which loses us google searches and I'd like to have turned off asap fyi) it's hard to communicate because we have to walk the line between giving information that will be useful to you, and not giving information that will be useful to attackers.

tldr; I'm making small changes based on the data that we have to hopefully decrease the downtime and the number of minutes that we're down daily. Right now attackers are using clever exploits in our code to do things like submit things a million times to lock up our servers. This is a real technical problem, and something that we need to build out to resolve for ten years down the line, but right now we're mostly applying bandaids.

2. I'm a Code for America fellow! That's really awesome and is a really great opportunity for me to help people in the US have better access to social services. I'm really, really excited about this. It's a fellowship that doesn't last the whole year, and has hours that don't really make it a full time job. The first question I asked during the interview process was if people in the past (this is the 5th class of fellows) have had other jobs, and the answer was about a quarter of each year have other jobs. I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to make it work (and have already started giving smaller tasks of mine to , and ) once we get past the insanity of the first few weeks. I'm still here, I'm in our staff chat channel every day answering questions from other staff members and primarily working on servers and infrastructure. We're hiring another PHP developer (yay!) and I hope to have some news on that and other exciting design-related developments soon, but I don't want to announce anything too early.

I'm sorry the content from the last year hasn't been things that you've liked. We've had more engagement and users online in the past six months than we've had in two years, and more engagement on the content that we've been posting (both in terms of actual reaction on things like news comment & forums) and time actually spent on site.

I know that it's hard to look past the last month or so of significant server issues (and the tree problem that was completely and totally our fault) or even the parts of the site that you don't like as much (there was a lot of HA content over the past year, obviously) to see that there was a lot of popular content updates.

We've got a lot of suggestions and ideas threads going, and have a pretty clear idea where we want to go internally. We're going to be trying some new things as far as our internal structure goes as well to try and get content on the site in a faster and more developed/finished way (instead of many projects going on at a time) which I think will really help.

Also I wanted to talk about the broader goal of communication, which is something else that we're really trying to define a strategy on. I agree that we do need some dedicated social media people, and maybe that's something we'll start looking for on an intern/unpaid/volunteer basis soon. If you're interested drop me a sMail ;)

Yeah - we wanna get better at that. I think for me the break is that like, I get a text message that the servers are down so I'm rushing to resolve the problem and usually forget to do the "I'm working on it" message because I'm trying to fix it. The staff member who texted me was on a train and couldn't update our social media at the time to reflect that we were working on it.

I think having better policy there would be much better.

We actually have all of the bugs from the bug forum inserted into our project management system and organized by level of importance to be fixed. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs that just aren't that important and aren't labeled as critical. If something comes in that is critical, or we have other features that have priority, then those things get done first. It's not a case of not remembering that it's there, or ignoring, it's that and us work really hard to set priorities and sometimes things fall to the bottom and stay there. There isn't really much else to say there. If you find a bug, report it, and it'll get categorized in our back end system (where usernames aren't even listed) and sorted into importance.

Perhaps we need to remove the bug forum altogether and move to an "issues" based system that most other sites use, where there isn't any communication past "this has been received" and entered into our bug tracker, I don't know.

Social volunteers who are on in hours that I and Grace aren't can easily update twitter saying "Hey, we know that the site is down and something is being done" while pinging us in whatever channel is easiest to see what the status is. They obviously aren't being tasked with resolving the situation, just keeping more information available.

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And another note (kind of) on social, right now we are working on migrating to a new support (ticket) system that will make the UAs job much easier, as well as make ticket filing a lot easier for users. Part of this new system includes facebook/twitter support, which means that UAs in particular will have access to and much easier ability to send out a tweet if something is up.