Exponent website tech problems gave me nightmares, literally.

I served on the Exponent II board at a time when the Exponent blog was enjoying greater readership than ever before in its history—and as web traffic increased, the site began crashing every time a post went viral. As the de facto webmaster, I could usually restore the website with some sort of band-aid solution, but only temporarily, because more effective, long-term solutions required cash. And we didn’t have any.

One night, I dreamed a dream. I was working on the Exponent blog at my computer. The files morphed into actors and I was in the midst of a sci-fi movie. The characters were running for their lives as the website—now reworked into a glamorous ballroom instead of a computer screen—crashed. One by one the characters vanished into thin air. The heroine, movingly portrayed by Sally Field, tried to save them. She ran with her arms outstretched, her beautiful red silk dress flapping in the wind as she tried to catch the other characters and save them from impending doom but everyone disappeared before she could reach them. In the end, she was the only one left and she rolled into a little ball and wept.

Is this just a fake, photoshopped image of Sally Field carrying a copy of Exponent II magazine? Of course it is.

I woke up and immediately checked the site. I had put in many volunteer hours during the past several months, redesigning the website to better showcase this treasure trove of Mormon feminist thought. I had just added a new feature called “Our Bloggers Recommend” to highlight important posts from the blog and elsewhere. The very first post I added to the new menu was Rachel’s 2013 post, “What I first learned about our Heavenly Mother.” This previously buried post represents the best this blog has to offer; it is well-researched—groundbreaking, in fact—and spiritually uplifting. People noticed. Two mainstream Mormon news outlets linked to it, sharing its goodness with whole new audiences of people who would have never found it hidden in our archives. Soon it was viral.

And so the site crashed. I spent the better part of the day working with our server provider to get it up. They gave me several tasks to “pass on” to our “web developer.” We didn’t have a web developer! So I did those tasks myself—all day long—taking time away from my paid job and my four kids and my husband—who coincidentally, had just had a serious talk with me earlier that morning about how I needed to tell my colleagues at the Exponent that it was time to hire someone to do the tech work because my volunteer hours were getting out of hand.  This wasn’t the first time unpaid, emergency tech work at the Exponent had interrupted my day. With no reliable funding source, we couldn’t stop the outages.

So when that nightmare about the Exponent website crashing woke me up, I immediately grabbed my phone and checked the site. In spite of having even higher traffic numbers than the day before, it was up and running. It was just a nightmare. Everything was okay. I got dressed, dropped my kids off at school and went to work, where I checked the site one last time, just for reassurance.

It was down.

This time, our server provider found that someone was attacking the site. “By someone, do you mean an actual person or a virus?” I asked.

“An actual person. Or several.”

Our humble feminist blog needs funds to fend off the haters.

Trying to keep our under-resourced website online became a full-time job for me, competing for my time against my actual full-time job; my family; and even the Exponent itself! With so much of my time pulled into applying tech band-aids to the Exponent website, I had no time left to write Mormon feminist content. I almost quit Exponent II.

Then readers came to the rescue, donating enough money to cover desperately needed website upgrades. That was almost a decade ago. Since then, I’ve contributed ten years of Mormon feminist content that may have never been written if we hadn’t found the funds to fix the website. Some of those blog posts went viral. And yes, some of those viral blog posts crashed the website, because website maintenance isn’t the sort of thing you can do once, ten years ago, and never do again.

A viral Exponent II blog post should be something to celebrate. I want to shout, “Take that, patriarchy!” every time a post goes viral, instead of biting my fingernails and fretting about whether our overworked, underfunded website can handle the pressure of so many readers.

If you’ve appreciated any Exponent II blog posts over the past ten years, posts that may never have been written if readers hadn’t chipped in back then, please consider donating now. Better yet, set up a monthly donation, so we can keep fighting patriarchy together for another ten years and more. Keep Mormon feminist writers writing, instead of troubleshooting tech issues on a broken website. Save Exponent II’s volunteer bloggers from tech nightmares.  Click here to make a tax deductible donation. Thank you!