Let me qualify that title.
It certainly was a grueling day Tuesday. Our website has been under inexplicable stress lately. Then at 3:30 p.m., a bizarre (considering the circumstances) technical error wiped out all of Monday’s and today’s published stories. This occurred in the final, very critical last two days of our unusually sluggish fall campaign.
The result was that everyone who clicked on links to those missing stories from our Facebook pages, Twitter, Google search and other search engines, websites and blogs were suddenly being met with a “page not found” message. Not good. It causes a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth, especially from our staff.
The deleted stories have been causing the website, even at this late hour, to stutter, crawl and stop on and off because of the flood of bounced traffic trying repeatedly to find them. Also, there were other residual complications.
And there is much more, but I won’t bore you with these tales of website woe, except to mention that we also found out that Canadians trying to make donations were wrongly being taken to the U.S. donation page during this entire campaign. That was discovered only today during the mayhem. It has been fixed, and for Canadians who donated anyway, all is well regarding your donations.
The curious thing was that today’s crash came a few hours after we published Kathleen Gilbert’s wonderful article, “My Final Letter to You…”.
We joked, given Kathleen’s announcement that she is about to enter a contemplative religious monestary, that “you know who” is enraged that yet another LifeSiteNews staffer is entering a religious vocation. Our Australian reporter, Jason Rushton, recently entered a seminary in Australia.
And then there was the Monday story about Vanessa Ore, “The Miracle story behind the 5-minute pro-life film touching thousands.” That awesome tale and accompanying film is waking up thousands of people to soul-saving eternal realities.
The stuff that we have been coping with lately has been so weird and unlikely that our joking suspicion of its underlying cause did not seem too outlandish.
Thus the title of this piece.
We are still coping with a lot of fallout from today’s event. For example, the comments under the deleted Monday and Tuesday stories are a mess. Most don’t match the stories under which they are posted. We are communicating with Disqus to have this repaired. Unfortunately, that sometimes takes weeks.
However, we must carry on. Not because this is our job. No, because this is a mission, and we cannot allow anyone or anything to deter us from reporting to the world what must be told – even when someone or something becomes increasingly enraged about it.
It seems to me that history is full of examples of that same phenomena happening to others who shone lights into darkness and said things that made some people very uncomfortable – even though that was not the direct intention.
Please say a prayer for us. We would appreciate it. Our technical support team would especially appreciate it at this time.