“I get by with a little help from my friends.” — The Beatles
As you know, I love song parodies. I was thinking of doing one to the tune of “Blowin’ In the Wind” to describe our situation here.
“How many times can the website crash, before you call it a day? How many bucks can you blow on a tech, until you have spent all your pay? Yes and how many lies can you hear from the host, until you decide to blow them away? The answer dear users is sometimes you actually won’t lose, if you hang in, one time you finally won’t lose.”
It has been quite an odyssey since January when this site split off from its sister site, Daily Sound and Fury. What I’ve been through the last ten and a half months reminds me of when I was about six and learning how to ride a bike. The bike kept crashing, too, but what I learned then was that if you pick the bike up and keep getting back on it, eventually the damn thing will stay up and you’ll be going down the road and it will actually seem easy. To this day I remember my amazement the first time the bike actually stayed up and I was pedaling it. My feelings this past month when the website has actually stayed up are very similar, believe me.
The good news is that the site is stable now and we finally have some affordable, competent technical support. The bad news is that there are necessary cleaning and maintenance tasks, upgrades and restorations which we don’t have the money for. The site crashes hurt us deeply. We lost traffic each time, not to mention credibility, and the triple crash the first week of July ended up severing the connection with Flipboard, which is the referral source that drives the most traffic here. It took me a few weeks to even figure out what was happening and then more time to hire somebody to fix the problem. Our views, and our earnings, plunged in July and have only started to return to the pre-July levels in the past two weeks.
I have put a lot of my personal money into the site as well and I don’t have any more. I will most likely be going back to work part-time either driving for Lyft or rolling burritos or maybe I’ll try to find some legal paperwork to do. That was my career before I became disabled. I have a law degree and I used to do motions, discovery, trial prep, that kind of thing.
PolitiZoom needs your help. There are functions on the site that I need to pay for so that we can both stay stable and so that we can regain functions and features that we have lost. You may remember the up-voting feature on comments. It’s a great feature and I want to restore it, but it’s not as simple as throwing a switch. I need to make sure that plug-in will compatibly function with the entire system. It will take a little time and money. Everything we need will take a little time and money.
I want to explain the lyric, “how many lies can you hear from the host, until you decide to blow them away.” That is another feature of the blogosphere which I didn’t know existed, bald faced liars and grifters. We have a hosting provider that lies to me every single time I call that I must immediately buy more resources, no matter what the issue at hand is.
I don’t do well with people lying to me, I never have, and you can take my word for it that in the fifteen, twenty times I’ve had to call the hosting provider and ask what’s wrong, what will it take to fix things, every single time they have told me I need to spend more money on server resources. And every single time we have fixed the problem without increasing the resources one iota. The real answer has always been something else.
I guess they fleece the naive if they are able to. And they’re not the only ones. I have had a conga line of techies come through here who have lied to me as well and told me that everything was fine and then kaBOOM, another crash and we’re down.
This is not an easy business to be in for a lot of reasons. It’s very similar to the wild west, bandits in black hats are ready to rob you blind at the first opportunity. And the amounts of money I’ve been quoted to fix things are sometimes laughable. I had one guy tell me he could maintain the site for $600 a month, payable in advance, do you love it? I asked him what he would do. He said, “Security research.” I said, “It would be nice if we could have somebody clear the cache once in a while.” And then there was the gal who wanted $5,000 to do a very expensive site migration before she would even write me a quote. All these figures are wildly beyond what the site earns. I don’t have thousands of dollars sitting in the business account and I have simply laughed in these peoples’ faces when they ask for that kind of cash. It’s either laugh or cry. And there have been times when I’ve cried, too, because I’ve thought, “What if I’m forced out of business? I can’t pay these exorbitant rates.”
It puts me in mind of the copyright troll who threatened to sue the site once, remember him? Richard Liebowitz? If you weren’t here then, a shyster lawyer demanded that I pay him $5,000 for the use of a photograph on one of our pieces and the piece made about seventy-five cents in revenue. This guy tried to convince me that a judge and/or a jury would award statutory damages of $3,000 or $4,000, when my “unjust enrichment” was less than a buck. As stated, the internet is wild and wooly. Bottom line, this grifter Liebowitz got suspended from the practice of law and then just a few months ago he got sanctioned $100,000 for lying about photos being copyrighted when they weren’t, which is what he tried to do to me. Believe me, I’ve got two college degrees and a Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks from what I’ve experienced in the blogosphere.
So friends, if you can reach into your pockets one more time and share anything at all, I would appreciate it. My goal is to raise $1,500, which would be enough to retool the front page, restore the up-votes, restore the Must Read section, create a few new sections and keep doing the upgrades and tasks that have kept us on the internet without incident the past month. I also have licenses on themes that will renew early next year and server fees.
Murfster and Mopsy are champs, as you know. They never complain, they keep posting wonderful stuff and they believe that we will come out the other end of this awful stretch of track. But this is the first year since I started running PZ that I can’t send gifts or give year end bonuses. That bothers me because not only do the other writers deserve to be taken care of but Denis Elliot, our moderator and community contributor, has toiled away religiously as well. He keeps the spammers from eating us like PacMan.
2021 has been a difficult year, to be sure, but I am looking forward to 2022 being a fine year. As stated, views are up and it may be a function of the site finally being stable for a while. Views are up to a very nice level the past few weeks. If we can just continue the way we are going now, we could be back in the relative clover that we were in in previous years.
I hope you can help. The best help of all is patrons on Patreon. If you haven’t become a regular patron and if you’re able, that would be stellar. Believe me, we would not be here without our patrons. You really are the wind beneath our winds, no metaphor there. It’s true.
Or send whatever you can as a donation to [email protected] at PayPal. If you want to mail a check, contact me via email and we can arrange that.
Many many thanks in advance for whatever you can do and most of all, thank you for being here and for making the site what it is. We are a total grassroots site. We hit the internet in March of 2018 and got 25, 30 views per article. That went to hundreds and then thousands and we’ve had pieces that have gone viral into hundreds of thousands. We’ve had articles reblogged on Alternet, Crooks&Liars, NationOfChange, Occupy and Bill Moyers’ PBS. We’ve had the Twitter version of pieces amplified by such diverse personalities as Gary Kasparov and Don Winslow, to Lincoln Project, Meidas Touch and Republican Accountability Project. And of course you remember Mike Lindell going batshit! If you missed that, stroll down memory lane. My fifteen minutes of fame on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
My long term goals beyond site stabilization and technical improvements are to put a budget together for advertising so that we can grow a more solid home base here.
Thank you for being here, and thank you for helping in any way that you can. Together we fight the good fight. This is a good little community and it’s going places, one inch of track at a time.
Toot toot!
Ursula, a quick question. For the past couple of days, I’ve noticed that EVERY time that I’ve come to the comment section to leave a reply–whether a new comment or simply responding to someone else–the section below the reply box (with the name/email information) has been blank.
So, I dutifully fill it in, then check the box by the “Save my name” line, go through the “I’m not a robot” reCAPTCHA bit and then post the comment.
Then, I go to another article and nothing was saved. I’d posted a comment on the “If Trump had listened” piece (timestamped Nov 14, 2021, 9:42 pm) and had to go through all the above steps and THAT SINGLE ARTICLE remains “checked” so (presumably) I could post another comment there. I’d opened a bunch of articles in separate tabs and none of them had the material was saved so I closed all those tabs and reloaded the articles but nothing had been saved–aside from the “If Trump had listened” article. I just assumed there was something glitchy in play so I didn’t think much of it. But earlier today (well, “today” as far the site’s concerned–yesterday by my local time), I found that nothing was different. Every article I open up (including this one) continues asking me to enter all the information.
I did have a Windows update a few days ago but this issue seems to have only started Sunday, at least two days after the Windows update.
I do feel bad bringing this up as I’m not currently supporting the site (though, obviously, I’d certainly be most unhappy if I were) but, at the same time, this does seem to be an issue that y’all might need to check into since it’s pointless to have the “Save my name” box if the site’s not keeping the information. (I know the wording says “in this browser” but I haven’t had any changes to my browser lately that should be doing this. I haven’t cleared cookies or deleted my history recently–I can enter “polit” into the browser bar and it autofills this site as the destination.)
As a test, I closed all the tabs I’d had opened then refreshed the home page and opened the “Fox in the Hen House” story and the “Reply” section remains blank–no name, no email, no check in the box by “Save my name.”
You’re saying that every time you leave a comment you have to fill in basic information like email? This is news to me. Let me see if anybody else is having that issue. There are people who comment regularly around here so I assume that if everybody was having that problem I would have heard about it by now.
And you’re supporting the site if you just show up to read and comment. Believe me, every bit of traffic helps.
Can you leave a comment or not? I see nothing like this, so I’m in the dark. I am assuming, as I said, that if the regular commenters around here were having this problem someone would have told me. Let me find out if others have this issue. Keep checking back.
Sorry if my comment seemed unfinished. What I mean is this:
I come to the site. I click on an article to read it. If there’s something that prompts me to comment, I scroll down to the comments section. Until a few days ago, my name and email are already filled in their respective boxes and the little “save” box is checked. The only thing I had to do to post the reply was to click the reCAPTCHA box and “post comment.”
But lately, the name and email boxes are blank and the “save” box isn’t checked. So I have to refill and recheck all that before doing the reCAPTCHA and “post comment” bits. However, once I’ve entered that information in any article, it remains for THAT article and THAT article alone. For instance, with this article, my very first comment required me to enter everything. When I posted the reply to my first comment, the boxes were already filled out and the “save” box was checked–as they are as I’m writing this comment (to post this comment, all I’ll have to do is hit the reCAPTCHA stuff).
But, I just posted a comment on the “Liz Cheney has been disowned” article and I had to enter everything. I just clicked on the “Let the idiot babble” article and, if I want to post a comment, I’ll have to enter everything. And I just clicked on the “Liz Cheney” article again, and my information has been saved.
If you need, I can always do screen shots so you can see exactly what I’m describing. Just email me and let me know.
Just for reference, I also have to fill everything in again if I want to post a comment, even though I always click the “save etc” button. As with Joseph, this information used to already be here if I wanted to comment. For instance, I have to fill it all in now.
Glad things are getting back to normal, Ursula 🙂
My browser (Chrome) still has my name & email saved OK, & my phone often uses any excuse to play up!
But seems the captcha thing typically doesn’t load when reading articles from notification, or from website &/or email menu, (says so & to ‘check internet connection’) – have to refresh page, then it always works. Don’t know if that’s just me.
I hadn’t had that happen before, unless I was away for quite a long time … butyeah, today I had to fill everything in and recheck the box. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t had it because, frankly, Im not really conscientious about clearing cache – but that isn’t it. I’ve been here too recently for the data to disappear now. My browser does the filling in for me with a couple of clicks, but that isn’t the same thing.
Also, as you love song parodies, have you checked out Rocky Mountain Mike on YouTube? He is a force of nature.