[Foundation-l] Report from Day 1 of technical testing

[Philippe Beaudette]

Almost 22 hours ago, we turned on the 2010-11 contribution campaign for a weekend of functional testing prior to launch.

We launched cleanly, I'm pleased to say  - there were a few initial hiccups (around the size of the graphic used in the banner, and our ability to pull numbers out of the database for reporting) but they're resolved or being resolved nicely.  The new cluster of servers for supporting the traffic is behaving nicely.

In the last 22 hours, we've accepted about $510,000 directly to the Foundation.  I don't yet have numbers from the chapters to report.  The Foundation's donors alone represent nearly 19,000 individual donors.  

We launched with three graphic banners, and are pleased with the performance of all of them: we're putting together detailed numbers now and will, as always, report them publicly on the fundraising pages on meta at [[m:FR2010]].

On the whole, a successful start to the testing period, as we anticipate the actual Monday launch.

Today we'll be testing banners requested by some chapters, as well as continuing with the "Personal Appeal from Jimmy Wales".  We're using today and tomorrow to refine and hone systems.

I encourage you to check out the donation pages, particularly in non-English, non-US localities, and send your feedback (you can send it directly to me if you'd like) so that we can get them optimized.  If you're in an area in which a chapter has control over the donation pages, I'll pass your feedback on to them, or you can write them directly.  

Thanks, everyone, for bearing with us as we get this thing up and going.  I'm very pleased with the performance so far, but as we're still in technical tests, please be on the lookout for anything unusual and report it either by email or in the #wikimedia-fundraising IRC channel.

Philippe





_______________________
Philippe Beaudette
Head of Reader Relations
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

pbeaudette at wikimedia.org

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