Members of CPA,
We know that the service provided to you recently has been severely affected by technical failures and outages. The worst part of these disruptions is that they knocked out our ability to communicate to the members as a group. We understand it has been frustrating to see all of the problems on the forum and website without getting an adequate response from CPA. Things are beginning to stabilize now, and we want to communicate what happened, what has been done to correct the problem, and where things are going in the future.
The first and most important piece of information to convey is that every effort has been made to preserve and backup the information on the website and the forums. The trove of knowledge that the members and our tech reps have produced over the years is one of the greatest reasons to be a part of CPA, and we are treating it with the highest importance.
With that said, the state of CPA’s web presence has been outdated and inefficient for a very long time. In the past, CPA did not put technology as a top priority, and it left us falling further behind with every delay. The general organization of the company followed a similar pattern, and when John passed last year, we began an effort to modernize the company, and deal with all of the growing problems. Unfortunately, the timing of this coincided with particularly vicious attacks on our webserver, and our job turned from one of planning a rebuilding effort to one of putting out fires. We have hired a team of developers that have secured the server, and are continuing to work on the remaining technical fires. We are putting as many resources as we can right now into security and data retention, and while these improvements don’t come with anything visible, they are crucial steps before we can move forward.
As our ability to communicate properly returns, we will be reaching out to the membership with more regularity. We will be keeping you updated on progress, but also interacting through surveys and forum posts to ensure that the changes we make are the changes you want to see. We are going to make the experience on our website and forums as great as the content, and we can only do that with a cooperative effort. This is a big project, and big projects bring unknown delays and problems. Rather than provide a constantly moving target date of completion, we will be committed to being responsive and informative as we get closer to the goal.
To summarize what has been done and what is planned: the server that hosts the site, email, and forums has been secured and is being stabilized. When the server is running smoothly again, we will begin transitioning to better hardware and hosting solutions. We are archiving the information from the forums and other sources, and are organizing it so that it will be accessible to the members. Once all of this is complete, we will be creating a fresh and clean forum for the membership that will be properly updated and moderated. The website will also be redesigned, putting a stronger focus on delivering tech info to the membership. During this process, we will be reaching out to the membership to make sure all of the new features we are developing are actually things that you want.
We know there has been a lot of “trust us” from CPA in the past, and we are essentially left saying this one more time. A lot of missteps were taken as an organization, but we are now moving in the right direction. There are real changes happening, and this project is long overdue, but the results this year will be tremendous. We know that the service will return to, and even exceed the level you had come to expect from CPA.
We thank you for all of your patience, and we look forward to making CPA the best place for any Cessna owner.
Sincerely,
The
cessna.org team
