Howdy people! In case you don’t follow us on Twitter, or have missed our updates, we’re here with some information about what happened to your badges.

Throughout Day One of the event, our website became overwhelmed by the number of users and started FREAKING OUT. We had tested it before the event, and everything was going smoothly, but as more and more people started signing up (and commenting in the forums, and getting badges, etc.) it became overloaded and started crashing. We received dozens of emails from people who couldn’t even get into the website, or who had the website crashing every time they did anything, or who weren’t able to get badges.

After much deliberation and extensive discussions with our web developer, the best solution we currently have is to disable the badges.

Obviously this is a huge disappointment, for us more than anyone else, as the badges were one of the most exciting additions to the event this year. Disabling them was our best solution for the time being, as they were the cause of many of the issues we were experiencing. However, we are still troubleshooting different ways to bring the badges back in a way that won’t overload the website. On the plus side, the site is running much more quickly than it was yesterday, which we see as a huge improvement. At least now everyone who wants to go on the website can, and we can all track our reading and chat in the forums without waiting 10 minutes for each page to load!

Thank you to all of the people who have sent us nice messages, we really appreciate it <3

ANOTHER UPDATE: The badges are back! Check the “Update Stats & Badges” tab on your profile!

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