Dear NARGS Member,
Thanks for your patience with the Seed Exchange start-up on December 15. My apologies for the problems some of you incurred. My special thanks to Laura, Elisabeth, Bobby, Joyce, our web developer and web hosts, who made these website corrections within 24 hours. Listen, even Amazon crashed on Prime Day ordering.
I know this doesn't help when you logged in during the early morning hours to get your first choice of seeds. Well, you were not alone: at one point, we had 90 members logged on simultaneously and the server crashed. We still managed to process 186 orders on the first day; more than half of the visitors to the site were first timers.
Thanks to all of you who earlier this year donated for website upgrades and repairs; we were able to fund the repairs quickly. And we received an additional $1,000 in donations during the first day while seed orders topped $3000. We now have 32 GB of RAM--enough to satisfy Tony Avent and other night owls at 4:00 a.m.
There are still some kinks from the old platform to be cleaned up, so keep those donations coming. And there is still time to get seed orders to NARGS; the deadline is January 31, 2019, and plenty of great seeds are available to order.
NARGS is the most dynamic plant society around, and I am proud to be your president. I hope to serve you better in the year ahead.
Best wishes of the season.
Betty Anne Spar, NARGS President and Number 1 Volunteer