We have been working recently on upgrading both the server the site (and Ride-track) is hosted on, and the software that drives the news section.
Unfortunately, in the process of moving the data over, some of it has been lost. We’re working to recover the lost information from the old server, and will replicate it here when we have located the missing data.
In the meantime, Ride Track is unavailable, and some information posts to the news section are absent.
We will be working to fine tune the display of information on the site once we have located the missing data.
In the meantime, we will be adding a new contact page to allow people to submit ride reports anonymously direct to us until Ride Track is back up and running. We’ll post more information on the technical progress as it is completed.
We appreciate your patience while we resolve these migration issues.
In the meantime, we are also working to revamp our “Helpful Links” list, as well as the “Service Disruptions” page. We hope to add more RSS feeds from various transit providers in the DC Metro Area to the page, allowing visitors to see at a glance what’s going on with transport in the area.
What’s Changed?
As you can see, the site has a new theme. This is still being fine tuned to improve accessibility.
The site has been separated from Ride Track, and uses an open-source blogging platform for the news and articles. The original combination of Ride Track and the old content management system was less efficient.
The server the site was hosted on was getting on in age, and while we were upgrading some of our other servers we decided to move the site to one of the new boxen. This allowed up to clean up a lot of stale material that wasn’t needed any more, as well as gain improvements to the server’s performance.
Spam is even more likely to get squelched than before - We already stomped on over 60,000 attempts to load spam onto the site since 2006 (when we started counting for amusement’s sakes). The site now uses Bad Behaviour to stomp on spam bots.
This should reduce the amount of spam that the server even begins to be aware of by, which has the added benefit of reducing server load as well as administrative tasks.
It’s rare, but possible, that genuine user comments may end up blocked - if this happens to you, please let us know!
