Dear all Fusioneers – Edward here for a quick update on Fusion101.com! (If you aren’t sure what a Fusioneer is – I refer to members of Fusion as Fusionites and Fusioneers – I could never decide which was best. Perhaps we need a vote 🙂
What I’ve been doing..
Fusion101 gets a new faster server & email alerts work again
OK – it probably looks like I’ve been doing nothing from the lack of visible change on the outside of the sites. But starting with Fusion101.com (and Fusion101.co.uk) – my original or ‘classic’ sites – sounds rather cooler than ‘old free Christian dating site’ – now finally after 2 years I’ve managed to move them to a new server, since the site had become unbearably slow to use, and also and more crucially – external email alerts (like ‘you’ve got mail at fusion101’ to Yahoo and Google mail etc) were not being sent to members.
This coupled with the fact that members could not retrieve login info if they did decide to login after not having used the site for a while – this has nearly killed the site! But that old site still has over 355,000 Christian singles members and has helped create 100’s marriages, so I still want to look after it – whether it’s clunky or not.
Fusion101 is not dead yet – though it nearly was!
Fusion101 has had many precarious moments in its relatively long (in web terms) history. For instance it has been duplicated on the front end and put up on the web under another name (by a Christian it turned out). It has been subject to several DDOS attacks (denial of service) – one by a member annoyed that I removed him for seriously messing me about. It has crashed many times when it got too busy (Fusion101 has never until the last 4-5 years when then site became really slow suffered from lack of users – always the opposite).
About 17 years ago I was told “Fusion101 would be dead in 6 months” when I decided to close the chatroom after I discovered only by chance looking at some data logs I was being bad-mouthed by several unhelpful folks on the site who were under the impression I was just some lazy bloke somehow associated with the site but who never did anything to contribute. I have just had to get a web company to remove 30+ websites that someone created on their system pretending to be Fusion101 – complete with ‘login’ and ‘register’ buttons (luckily they were designed so badly you’d have to be quite unaware to be fooled by these). Now they say to be copied is flattery – but in this case I’d say it was a pain in the behind 🙂 Anyway – Fusion101 did service all these problems and too many more to mention! Thank you god for sustaining me as it’s made me pretty physically ill at times with stress.
The new updated site can be found here >>
101FreeChristianDating.com (new beta site)
Future proofing 101ChristianNetworks..
Over the last 17 years I’ve trialled and tested so many ‘dating’ softwares I have lost count how many – and lost count of how much it cost me (at least over 100K). Not expecting a good outcome from these softwares I also paid for 2 new bespoke platforms/sites to be built at the same time, but unfortunately (probably down to my own bad judgment and lack of experience) none of these proved useful.
Ironically I always had to revert back to my good-old simple original Fusion101 site code – that apart from a colour makeover – is essentially the same as it was when I designed it in 1998/9. I really learned the meaning of; if it ant broke don’t fix it. Trouble was – as the web upgraded and it’s requirements grew more stringent – parts of my site no longer worked. Not to mention developers usually breaking 1 thing every time they went to fix 2. The upshot of all this is that for the past 5 years Fusion101.com has been pretty much unusable. Despite this – my faithful members trudged on using it and marriage testimonials still regularly come in from folks that got married via the site some time ago and never let me know – or just tied the knot!
2021 – About to give up – but gave it 1 last try!
About October time last year I had really reached the end of my tether and health trying to update the existing site that I love – and has said to God – if my last effort did not work to update the old fusion101 site – I think I’d assume it was not something I should be doing. So I put in one last effort to try some new software which I felt was well supported and to my shock – after testing and re-testing and re-testing I had a new platform I was happy with – and not only that – perhaps the one I should have had in the beginning that is highly extensible (expandable) and mobile friendly longer term. The result if you haven’t tried it is https://www.101freechristiandating.com/siteapp/
At last – a new site and platform (after 17 years trying 🙂 )
What this means is – I now have a PROPER platform for my Christian singles and whilst it’s actually not as simple to use for the user front-end – it is 100 – no 1000 times easier for me to manage back and and for me to improve without (as I used to do with my non-templated site) have to edit dozens of pages every time I wanted to make a single edit.
All this has been quite expensive – so if you are moved to buy me a coffee or make a small donation to pay my developers that would REALLY help me. Thank you in advance and please donate here >>