Sorry everyone I have been awfully overwhelmed lately with this semester of college wrapping up and I have a ton of crazy final projects to create such as an LED shirt whose lights are motion activated.
I hate giving the excuse that I have been busy though...
UPA Forum
The UPA forum was on a very old server. For years while the internet has been progressing and evolving what ran the forum has not been changing along with the internet. No one really was updating the technical side of the forum (from what I gather at least). So one day the forum became so outdated that it just stopped showing up. I don't think anyone really expected that to happen. I read the blank white screen of the forum that basically just said "Error...." and some other words/code I didn't understand, and I just guessed that maybe the forum got hacked or something went wrong. Just because I said that some people wanted to put me in charge of fixing the forum because I guess I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. In reality, I have no experience with the technical side of forums. Luckily when they found a new webmaster they gave him the job to fix the forum. His idea was to integrate the forum with the UPA website. I am not exactly sure how much he has done trying to fix the forum and update it. I am not even sure if that data is lost forever or if it is recoverable. We lost the forum basically because we probably did not have anyone with a tech background to keep it up to date.
Photo Pages
You are right the photo pages are missing. I thought what would happen is all of the old pages would be put onto this new site, but at the moment I do not see everything that the old site had. I also would like to see all of the old convention pages back as well. I really love looking at the old convention photos. One of the things I wanted to do is start trying to get more peafowl photos for those photo pages, but since they aren't up that is definitely a setback.
Quote from Garden Peas:
As far as not being notified when it was time to renew your membership, one of the now ex board members was slacking on sending out those notifications. We have since voted them off the board and we have two people working on Membership & General right now as a lot of things had been neglected in that area.
I will be honest it is EXTREMELY difficult sometimes working on the UPA stuff. Sometimes there are days I don't even want to bother with it because I get a feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by it all. The organization is slowly rising from the rubble that it had become. There was neglect in a lot of areas, and all of us are having a difficult time uncovering just how many areas that were neglected and need updating and overhauling, etc.
I am not saying it is overcoming the issues just to take a positive spin on it because I am a BOD now, but that is literally what I have learned since becoming a BOD member. The UPA is like a garden. At first when it was planted it was all nice and new and exciting, and then people started getting too lazy to weed the garden and it got overgrown with thorns and now we have to come in and weed out the bad plants from the good ones and get cut a little in the process so that one day, the good plants will bloom and be beautiful again and attract more people.
I hope this does not discourage anyone from the UPA. I have met so many wonderful people through the UPA and I have learned so much through it. I have also gotten some unique opportunities as well. We are working hard to improve it even if some areas look rough right now.
