Note to readers and contributors from John Tsarpalas, November 4, 2008

From Ballotpedia

Dear Ballotpedia readers

Ballotpedia's servers crashed the evening of Monday, November 3 due to a tremendously high volume of traffic. We are working on an emergency basis to solve this problem.

For today, one solution that we are implementing is disabling Ballotpedia's internal search mechanism. You can still access any and all articles on Ballotpedia through links on pages that take you to another page--if you are looking for the ballot measures in your state, you can do that by clicking on your state in the map below. Or, for overview articles, try some of the links in the navigation box to your right. You can also find the article on Ballotpedia by going to your preferred search engine and entering the name of the ballot measure plus the word "ballotpedia".

When we started Ballotpedia, we didn't quite realize how many people are interested in finding out about ballot measures. A month ago, we began to suspect that Ballotpedia would be very active right around this time. This led us to increase our server space by a factor of eight.

In addition, last night, when we saw that Ballotpedia's traffic was exceeding even that capacity, we added even more space. Unfortunately, even that was not enough to meet the demand.

I apologize wholeheartedly both to our readers and to our many content contributors and editors who have worked so hard to create compelling, accurate and comprehensive articles about the ballot measures on your ballot.

I pledge to you that I am working as hard and as fast as I can to get Ballotpedia back up and in working order.

Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me, John Tsarpalas. My e-mail address is jtsarpalas(at)samadamsalliance.org, phone 312-920-0080.