So, some of you may have noticed this morning that pretty much every project was showing closed and/or deleted. Needless to say, as soon as the issue reared it’s ugly head, I got lots of tweets and emails about it. As one user put it, “I had a mini heart attack when I saw our project was closed”. You and me both, believe me.

I’ll spare the technical details, but essentially in an attempt to combat some issues with really old kickstarter projects, I put in some new verification code which was working great in the test environment, and I deployed it late last night so it doesn’t impact folks as much as possible. However, when one of these projects got added, it caused all the projects processed behind it in the queue to be marked with it’s same state, which was really bad.

Thankfully I deployed the new “Contact” page a couple days ago and people were able to put that to work to let me know when it started happening, which is exactly what I needed to help figure out when it blew up. Thank you all for that.

I was able to at least roll the status updates back pretty quickly, so people could use the charts without the messages over them. However, the tracking data needed rolled back into the active tables, which I just didn’t have availability to get it done until much later in the afternoon. I wrapped that up a few hours ago after pinpointing the issue and fixing it before rolling back the data and re-enabling tracking, then hovering over the tracking process for a couple hours to be sure all was as it should be.

Lawyer Grenades

Speaking of “as it should be”; today during the whole debacle, I had someone actually threaten me legally for their project being marked as closed as if it was somehow going to motivate me to fix things faster than my hair-on-fire brain was already working on while simultaneously trying to respond to every email and tweet to apologize and keep people in the loop. </giant run on sentence>

I understand if you’re panicking and you think that somehow my little site is going to impact your project, but holy cow, my first interaction with you should not contain the words “I will seek legal counsel”.

Let me share something with you. This whole Kicktraq thing is primarily the work of one person, and it’s a lot of freaking hard work. What you see on a daily basis is but a fraction of what happens behind the scenes. I frequently develop, test, and deploy really-late in the night so it impacts you folks the least. I’m constantly working on cool new features to bring you between fielding tweets and emails from people who want to better understand the charts, project owners who want advice from me about what they can do to succeed, or people who are looking for data for research projects or planning their own future campaigns.

I answer every single email, respond to every single tweet, take time to help redirect people to resources to help them succeed, even compile data for people when I’m able. I do it all for nothing. Why? Because I loathe advertisements and I’ll never take money to give a project preferential status (and believe me people have asked). What I get out of working on Kicktraq is the same thing that you all get – really awesome data for almost any project I look at, and the opportunity to help other people attain their dreams and be successful.

So, please folks, if you have an issue – understand I WANT to help you resolve it and help you succeed. If something on the site irritates you or makes you feel uneasy and you’re not happy with how we try and help you, just tell us. I’m happy to consider any and all feedback. If that’s not good enough, we’re happy to stop displaying data for your campaign on this site, again just tell us. Don’t come out swinging and tossing lawyer grenades over the wall at me thinking it’s going to somehow motivate me. I can promise you I’m already helping you to the best of my ability. Plus, that’s really not cool.

For the rest of you who responded with positive feedback, thank you! It meant a lot after a really stressful day. I’m so happy to hear from users who are excited to have their data available again and from project owners of currently running very successful projects telling me how much they enjoy using the site. Makes all the stress worth it.

On that note, early bedtime for me. Don’t break anything. Not sure my heart could take much more for a few days.