So I had a conversation a few days ago with my best friend about FraggedNation. He's only recently gotten into gaming, and he's totally fascinated with what we, as a community, have created here. I was explaining to him that I spend so much time chasing down bugs, adding new features, and general site maintenance that I rarely take the time anymore to interact with the community. It was really the first time I'd thought about that in a LONG time.

See there was a time, not long ago, that myself and a handful of admins ran this site. We interacted with users, helped admins run their ladders, and participated in community discussions and polls. Personally I always got a lot out of it because I could listen to the users and then help shape the system based on their input. But as time dragged on, I found myself more and more busy with maintaining the site that I had less and less time to actually BE a part of the community. Now we have almost 200 volunteer admins, and we have an amazing set of higher-level admins here that run this site. There was a time that I couldn't leave for more than a day or so, and now we're in a position that my presence here, apart from coding and maintenance, is no longer even required. This is an amazing concept for me, because I literally remember the day I wrote the first few lines of code for FN on a plane ride to Minnesota for a gathering of gamers - none of which I'd ever met in person. Gaming has truly changed my life, and I'm glad I'm able to share this passion with every member of this community. This place truly is my greatest achievement, and I want to make sure that people here at FraggedNation know that.

So I definitely got myself away from what I really wanted to post here. My long winded story above is basically just a precursor to me saying here, in this blog, that I need to make sure I stay connected. I'm going to try and blog a bit more so that members of this great community can have some insight to the things I'm working on to make this place the best it can possibly be.

It's along that vein that I post this blog! Today is a milestone day for FraggedNation, as we've successfully implemented a load balancing solution to help keep things running fast and smooth. This was a huge architecture change for the site, and the rollout went as smooth as hoped.

As always thank you to everyone who supports this amazing community.

Frag On!