So the other night I was feeling industrious and I fired off at least 150 emails to craigslist users who were selling stuff in Naperville. I was asking them to repost their ads on Naperthrill.com and on Monday I woke up to a bunch of replies saying that our classifieds wasn’t working!! Aaaarrrrgh.
The problem was caused by some other work that had been done on the site over the weekend, and we didn’t know that it had affected stuff the way it did. Kudos to Patrick, our engineer, for fixing the problem quickly! Whew. We’ll never know how many people tried to post ads and just never said anything when they couldn’t, but the good news is that the people who did email me back seemed pretty understanding of the fact that we’re just getting started and still working through some issues.
The moral of this story for us is that we gotta be more careful and do a lot more testing when there are major code changes. The moral of this story for our users is that if you have a problem with our site, you gotta tell us about it!! (pretty please?!) If those people hadn’t emailed me about the problem with classifieds, it might still be busted. So… to all those who brought the problem to our attention… thank you!! 
