State of Tantalus

[rasiel]

I'm pleased with the stability of the system software. In the year+ that Tantalus has been online the system has only been brought down once, for about 15 minutes. Other than that system outages have totaled less than an hour since launch.

On cutover to a free-based subscription system we had a nasty glitch whereby many members who were paid up were still barred from access to the premium features as well as a slew of related issues. These all in all took several weeks to finally clear out.

Each year Tantalus has received a set amount of funding both for development as well as hosting. I'm happy to say that the membership pool has now reached the point where it offsets the hosting fees, which are considerable since the site has reserved for itself a dedicated server, daily backups and extra bandwidth all meant to increase reliability of the service. Unfortunately, the development part of the budget has been exhausted through 2006 so we can expect a pause in the rollout of new features until early next year.

The new features list currently sits at over 60 line items but among the highest priority we have scheduled to launch are the following:

- Flip printing
- A revamped basic search
- A more ambitious spreadsheet tool
- Ability to add non-coin items from your collection including books, antiquities and so on

Again, I'm pleased with the growth of the site and continue to value your input. It may not be the case that every single wishlist feature is feasible at this point in time but I do listen and make every reasonable attempt at accommodating features that will be of use to the widest number of members and visitors.

Ras
info at tantalus coins.com