In mid September, Christian Connection, was one of the sponsors of an exciting and challenging film and debate event.

The Pope’s visit inspired a film director John Deery, to rent the Odeon West End to show his film “Conspiracy of Silence” which was a drama about the Catholic Church, the issue of celibacy for priests and the personal issues it posed for them. After the film, there was a passionate debate about the issue, featuring among others, comedian, Frank Skinner, Dame Helena Kennedy QC and the Catholic Bishop of Nottingham with very lively contributions from the floor as well. The event received several mentions in the media, in the Times, Radio 4′s World Tonight, and also the Church Times, Christianity Magazine, Inspire Magazine and Ship of Fools.

It was an opportunity for Christian Connection to become involved in an important and topical debate with a wider audience. Many Christians, not just Catholic Priests, struggle to reconcile the call of faith and theological teaching with modern attitudes to relationships, sex and marriage. There are so many questions which people rarely get a chance to ask or get many helpful answers from their churches.

Here are some links about the evening:

Inspire Magazine

Simon Jenkins blog – featured on Ship of Fools

I thought it would be good to explain a little bit about what’s been going on behind the scenes as we’ve been relaunching Christian Connection and give  an update on the current status.

We started at 11pm on Monday 26th by closing down the old site. The next step was a long process of transferring all the profiles onto the new site. We had allowed until Wednesday morning for this to complete, but we were ahead of schedule and by lunchtime on Tuesday everything was in place. We switched on the new site and visitors started to arrive straight away.

We were a little unprepared for the number of members who immediately came back to try the new site. We had approximately double the usual number of visitors. We have been running the new site in Australia for many months to test capacity, but the demand here has been far higher than we allowed for. We immediately added extra servers to cope with the increase in demand and although this helped, it wasn’t enough to keep the site running fast enough.

The next step we took was a difficult decision but we decided to temporarily disable some features – such as hidden profiles (which was called ‘Already seen’ on the old site). Disabling hidden profiles enabled us to speed up the search. On Tuesday afternoon we upgraded to a faster database server. This just about kept us running through Tuesday evening (the busiest time is always in the evening).

We all had a very late night on Tuesday keeping the site all running and reassuring members. We were all back in the office early on Wednesday morning with a plan of action.

Erica, Joff, Morgan and Marina were all answering all of the customer service queries.

Dom, Simon and myself (Sam) would be working on the performance issues.

We started fine tuning the site code and working with our hosting company Heroku to further increase capacity. They offer a service that allows us to very quickly switch on new servers when we need them. On Wednesday evening we upgraded the database server again to one 5 times larger in capacity. This resulted in about 30 minutes of downtime while we moved the data to the new server.

Since the relaunched we have received over 500 queries from members, and the team is working to catch up with individually answering all the new queries coming in. It may take a little longer than usual to receive a response, but we will answer everyones query. Dom also chipped in to work with Erica answering customer queries late in to Wednesday evening, Joff has been answering queries (from the train!) and Jackie has been doing the night shift from her holiday in the US.

The overall site activity has been amazing, especially considering the teething problems.  5403 emails have been sent, 5106 waves, 1001 new photos have been uploaded and 293 new members have joined (at the time of writing).

Everyone has been working staggeringly hard to keep up the level of service you’d expect – and we’re all exhausted. But we’re still really excited by the response and the support of our fantastic members. This is keeping us motivated to keep pushing on.

All these improvements have helped a lot, with now only some slowness at our very busiest time – about 8pm. We’re continuing to work on this today and we’re hopeful that we can solve any remaining sluggishness at peak time before the rush this evening.

It would be really helpful to us if you could delay contacting us unless you have an urgent query so we can keep up answering the members who need our help the most, but do contact us if you need to and we’ll respond to everyone as soon as we can.

Thanks again for your support and for the encouraging messages.