Yes, there have been a couple of vanities about the slowdown and they are not idiotic, they are the truth. The site has been slow for months with no mention of improving it’s performance. Question, why does FR have to go down before anything is done to repair it, when there is plenty of evidence it is ailing and failing?The FReepathons are taking the whole quarter to complete, do you think the above might be a clue as to why? FR is slowly losing it’s base, members are finding other venues to spend their time. If not fixed properly, I would not doubt that it will soon fall into the dustbin of history.
Well, if we’re heading for the dustbin, I’d like to first thank the Lord for providing the last 21 years of solutions to the many problems we’ve encountered along the way.
We are just a couple of programmers doing what probably never should have been attempted. Every business expert will tell you that you should never start a business with no capital and no prior expertise in the specific field. John and I both had lots of experience in programming and he had some on the internet, but I had none. And neither of us had any experience whatsoever in politics or media.
John had some experience in operating a bbs when he was a teenager, but the only experience I had with online discussion groups was as a three year user on Prodigy. And I had already proven that I was the world’s worst manager when my 9 year old successful software company that I had just taken public on NASDAQ in 1995 was failing only a year or so later.
By that time John had been urging me for a couple years to get on the internet. It also happens that I was getting very frustrated with Prodigy at that time. It was basically a “private” discussion group in that you had to be a paying customer to gain access and it was on a private computer service not the internet. I figured we would get a lot more exposure in our efforts to fight government corruption if we could get a discussion group going on the internet.
I looked around on the internet in the ‘95-96 time frame, but could not find a political forum other than email usenet groups and could not find any workable forum software packages off the shelf. So, I saw an open niche and dived in with no planning and no capital and no experience in the field and no proven marketing or management skills.
We programmed and started FR as a hobby and it just kinda took off from there on its own after the good Lord hooked us up with a great group of patriots who provided us with all we needed to continue building and keep it going.
I have no technical knowledge whatsoever, but John had and has the expertise to build our original server system and he has expanded and rebuilt it several times over the years. We are now at the point of trying to decide whether to rebuild our plant again or just go with the flow to the cloud. There are obvious advantages to both and perhaps some not so obvious disadvantages.
But rest assured that, God willing, we will be doing something soon.
But we still have no capital and no support staff and we’re still saddled with the world’s worst manager (me).
Praying the Lord is still smiling down upon us and continues showing us the way.