On Site Technical Difficulties: Update

Dear Readers,

Many of you have written in after noticing that our search function isn't working properly. This has been ongoing, up and down, to various levels, over the past few months.

Typing keywords or names into the search field is supposed to pull up a complete list on our site of wherever those words appear, so readers can easily find work by a particular writer, for example, or the name of a poem.

That isn't working very well right now, with some keywords pulling up nothing at all, some pulling up partial lists, and some seem fine. 

Our site is easy to navigate with a functioning search field, but without one we are truly disadvantaged. The daily posting style allows us to showcase more work and be more flexible, instead of having specific journal issues, but when something goes wrong with the search, it can be impossible to access the archive or a particular writer.

The platform engineers are working on the problem. It is an engineering issue that is platform wide, not specific to our site or to anything we are doing. I have been constantly hounding customer service for some time now and have been told they are "aware" and "working on it." 

The site worked great for five years. Then we had a months-long problem last year where posts could not be scheduled to post in advance, they only posted right away. This was a huge headache for us, needless to say, as the accepted works are put together in advance of posting. It was finally resolved. Then this new issue came up, and it has been up and down. Right now it seems like almost no words work at all. 

I'm writing this just to let you know we are aware of the problem and have been proactive about it. Unfortunately it is out of my hands and the host has asked me to be patient. I feel we have been patient enough but there is nothing I can do to make them fix it faster, as it is not about our site per se but about their engineering issues.

I have considered switching to another platform, but fear the devil I don't know. This platform until last year was pretty smooth and easy for me to run with my very basic skill set in technology. Things didn't go wrong very often. I am afraid of losing the archives or other mishaps during transfer, and there is no guarantee that the new platform wouldn't have problems, too. 

So I am asking for your patience, too, and thank you once again for reading us, writing for us, sharing links of your favourite works online. This too shall pass, hopefully sooner rather than later.

love, The Ekphrastic Review