We often hear from members who can’t find anyone in their area (we are sure there are plenty more who we never hear from!) When we started to investigate why, it is often due to their search options. In particular, the children options can be confusing. For example the second children option “Do they want children?” offered the following choices:

It’s important to note that these search options relate directly to how a member has answered the question on their profile.

Looking closely at the example above, these options are very similar: “Not sure yet” and “Let’s talk about it”. However, if I search only for people who have answered “Not sure yet”, I will be eliminating members who have answered “Let’s talk about it”. My perfect match could end up hidden behind this one tickbox!

Essentially we have to strike a careful balance between offering wide enough answers in the profile questions to allow everyone to express their personality/circumstance and keeping the search options broad enough to avoid eliminating potential matches from search results.

We assure you that we are listening to your feedback and we are reviewing the recent changes in light of that. The bottom line is that the Christian Connection team is focussed on connecting you with other likeminded Christians to ultimately help you find your perfect match. In order to do this, you may need to cast your net a little further!

In particular, we have tested this on iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. We will be making ongoing improvements to the mobile views but you can start using them today.

To try out the site on your phone, simply launch your browser on your mobile phone and logon to www.christianconnection.co.uk.

You can find the login link at the bottom of the homepage.

We had to take the site offline this morning for a few hours. We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused you. Everything is now running as normal.

In summary, waves are now integrated into your inbox. Any wave you reply to becomes part of a new conversation.

Why the changes?

One of the most frequent things we hear from members is their frustration in not receiving a response from waves and emails. This is the first stage in a set of improvements that we hope will encourage more members to respond to their messages. These changes should also make your mailbox load faster.

Simplified Mailbox Design

We have removed much of the visual noise on the Inbox and Conversation views, so you can focus more on reading your messages. We have replaced the ‘bubble’ design on the Inbox with a cleaner, simplified layout. Similarly, the Conversation view has been simplified; in particular the ‘Sent’ and ‘Read’ dates have been removed at first glance. Simply move your mouse over the message to reveal these dates.

See more information on the changes >

Richard and Julie tell their story of how they met on Christian Connection. Richard lived in Surrey and Julie in Stirling, over 400 miles apart! They clicked after their first meeting Heathrow and after maintaining a long distance relationship, Richard finally popped the question at the top of the Wallace Monument. Julie said yes and they’ve been happily married since October 2007.

We’re always thrilled to hear from people who have met through Christian Connection. Thank you Richard and Julie for sharing your story. A great example of how the Internet can bring people together over distance. We wish you all the best for your future together.

Click here to read the full article (PDF file – 1.7 MB)

Read more articles on our press page or read more success stories

Thanks to everyone who took part in the video and a huge thanks to all who have been part of Christian Connection since we launched back in October 2000.

Read more success stories

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

Additions and improvements made this week:

• Added auto-scaling monitor to boost server power at busy times
• Enabled suggested profiles on member home page
• Enabled expanded results in Search & Match
• Added multiple asset hosts to speed up page load times

Here are some of the fixes we’ve made:

• Set matches email gender to opposite gender always
• Corrected end date in age search
• Remove un-needed params from anonymous searches
• Fixed error message on forgot password form if submitting an incorrect email address

Site Activity for this week:

10,784 emails sent this week
13,269 waves sent this week
1,376 new photos uploaded this week
457 new members joined this week

You may have noticed the site was down from around 5:30pm this afternoon (for 38 minutes). Sorry for the inconvenience. Sam has been working on a major update to the Search & Match area, which has drastically improved the speed of the search. This in turn has improved the overall speed of the whole site. He needed to take the site offline whilst making this change.

Here’s a rundown of additions and improvements we’ve made since the launch:

• Completely Re-factored search algorithms to speed up Search & Match
• Improved fraud matching system to more accurately catch and block scammers
• Upgraded database size and number of connections to better handle number of incoming requests
• Increased number of server connections (dynos) to improve page speeds and avoid timeout messages
• Increased maximum messages per day for full members to 30
• Enabled deleting of sent messages
• Improved asset caching and compression to load images and stylesheets faster
• Made ‘last logged in’ date more readable

We’ve also been working on a few fixes and corrections:

• Fixed odd characters appearing in mailbox messages
• Removed previously deleted messages from mailboxes
• Reinstated keyword search
• Restored hidden members lists
• Fixed blocking on chat

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with comments and suggestions. We have been listening to your feedback and we’ve started by making some immediate changes to the most important issues. We still have quite a few improvements which we’ll be making in the coming weeks. The new platform will allow us to introduce changes faster than the old site.

Thanks again for bearing with us, for all your positive comments and for being part of the Christian Connection community.

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.

We have spent months developing, testing and tweaking the new platform. We ran a beta programme and launched the new platform on our sister site in Australia. These were helpful dry runs, but nothing can replace the ultimate litmus test of moving the live CC site lock, stock and barrel onto a brand new platform. So last night we switched off the old site, packed everything into boxes, loaded the trucks, shipped everything to the new site, unpacked, moved everything into position, opened the doors and waited for people to arrive.

We were hoping for a positive response but the rate at which people started to arrive, surpassed our expectations and things on the site started to slow down. We immediately got to work and increased the capacity on our server and started making tweaks to the code to improve the speed. Unfortunately the bottom line is, that it hasn’t gone as smoothly as we’d liked and some of our members have been experiencing a frustratingly slow response time from the new site.

We’ve now managed to isolate the problem and the site is back up to speed. However, we’ve taken the step of disabling some features whilst we rework some of the code.

Thanks for bearing with us as we iron out these few teething problems. We’re still very excited about the new site and we hope you’ll also come to love it.