What happened to the website? What happened to get it back up and why did it take so long?

Hello Everyone, Dracon Adun, President of the DBGA and I want to address the massive Elephant shaped failure in the room.

The Dagorhir.com website has until today been down for a inexcusable amount of time. Below I will detail what I did in this process, and what I could have done better. Then I will ask some things of the community and try to spark some conversations so that this is the last time we have a situation like this in our communities history.

One last thing before I begin, I am sorry and I have failed this community and this position in all of this, and I vow to do whatever i can to make it right.

So on September 7th 2019 I was informed that our website Dagorhir.com was experiencing some serious issues and it was swiftly taken down and allegedly fixed in short order.

Over the next week or so it was made clear that this was not a simple fix that would get handled with a few hours of code scrubbing and effort to get running smoothly.

By the end of September I had a plan of attack with the help of Gamhain. We needed to procure funds and get Gamhain some additional software and tools to have this handled in its entirety.

I approached the AWC to have the petty cash withdrawn and sent over to Gamhain. This was very quickly approved and no one thought but myself that this really needed to be a AWC issue. I went this path because I did not want to have money spent, even very obviously ethically so without the AWC's consent.

The next step was to get Gamhain and the current treasurer Erekose to get in contact and exchange money and method of such transfer ASAP. This is were things broke down.

Due to the nature of Gamhain's and Erekose's volunteer hoods, it became very difficult to get these two to finalize this and it was not until Mid-November where I far to slowly ran out of patience and simply paid Gamhain out of my own pocket his needed  resources for the tools he needed to get the site functional again.

With December beginning Gamhain waited for the transaction to clear and here we are, Mid-December and the website is back to full function.

The errors I made in the process were numerous and while some minor, others were massive. I hereby am learning from this situation and want to change things to be better moving forward.

I wish to see the red tape that I felt the need to go thought be repurposed into some manner of system that permits the funds designated for the website be available to the webteam that runs it with very little communication outside of receipts and a brief explanation of needs/wants for why the purchases were made.

I wish to find a way to make it so there is a designated webteam that runs the Dagorhir.com site, not a small group of volunteers that struggle to align schedules together to function.

I am always looking for help with these and other issues. I will always listen to advice and critique from anyone. I got this job not because i was the most qualified, I am not and know that I am not. I have skills to be sure, but they are in team and group management. I do not know how to write lesiglation, I do not know how to run a website. I got this position because I have lived in Maryland for my entire Dagorhir career (until this Jan 2019, but that is rather recent, I live in Virginia now) and this gave me experience in Aratari and I am very well known in this chapter. I am the leader of a very lively but not heavily combat focused unit. I have known the older generation of this game ever since the big split. I want better, I know we are capable of it and I am in the position now to help usher that change. With what is left of this year long term, I need to hear from the community, I want your ideas and I want to help improve this community and game so that simple things like a random cyber attack do not cripple our website for 4 months.

It is was past time to modernize the structure of this Community. Help me, I promise i'll listen.