DU's General Election Season postponed until Monday June 20 [View all]
This discussion thread was locked by Skinner (a host of the Announcements group).
Well, this is embarrassing. 
As most of you know, last week we began the seven-day transition period from Primary Season to General Election Season and announced that DU's General Election Season would officially begin on Thursday June 16.
From the perspective of the Admins, this transition has been nowhere near as straightfoward as previous ones. For the past six months we have been planning and building out a new system to replace/upgrade/improve the current Jury system. Elad has been working his butt off to get it finished, and over the last seven days we have been testing the new software with the help of MIRT members.
The new software is ready to go, but we have an unexpected problem -- Elad is not going to be fully available this weekend to monitor the site and make sure everything is running smoothly.
Therefore we have been faced with a choice: either go ahead and put up all the changes tomorrow -- but run the risk that something might go awry over the weekend and make DU unusable for hours at a time -- or wait until Monday when we can be sure that any (inevitable) bugs are identified and fixed quickly.
I know some people like to buy into the fantasy that DU is taking million-dollar handouts from the DNC, but the truth is that this site is now and has always made money solely from member donations and advertising. If we could afford a whole team of programmers, that would be great. But as it is the entire burden of maintaining the database, and programming all of the ideas that EarlG and I come up with, falls to one person: Elad. If he's not available, then we don't have any way to bring the site back if something goes wrong.
This was not an easy decision to make, but we have decided that the safest option is to wait until Monday. I know this will probably come as a disappointment to some of you, but we decided that being forced to wait a few more days before officially ending Primary Season was a better outcome than the possibility that a bug in the new software may shut the site down for the entire weekend.
Our apologies, and thank you for continuing to support and enjoy Democratic Underground. We'll post another announcement on Monday.
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