I want to make sure this accomplishment doesn't pass by unnoticed and unappreciated.

As most of you know, a week ago we shut down Democratic Underground for a day and a half in order upgrade our web servers. We had been running the site on the same old web servers for about a decade, and they served us well for a long time, but it was clear that they were nearing the end of their useful lives as we experienced ever more frequent glitches and instances of degraded performance. The limitations of our old servers were most obvious during times of especially high traffic that occur during big news events.

The upgrade was many months in the making, but it seems that we pulled it off just in time. Over the weekend we saw a big news double-whammy, with the DNC server breach and the Democratic presidential primary debate both occurring over a two-day period. Democratic Underground is already significantly busier now than it was a year ago but this past weekend really pushed us over the edge -- in fact, measured by number of posts, Saturday was our single busiest day since general election day in 2012.

In the past, this is the type of thing that would have crippled the site, and we would have been forced to systematically remove functionality from the site in order to deal with the stress on our servers and maintain access for our members. But this past weekend we were prepared for the massive spike in traffic -- the new servers held up beautifully without needing to resort to any emergency measures.

I know that people generally don't notice when an emergency fails to happen, so I wanted to make sure that you all were aware of it. I especially want to express my appreciation for all of the behind-the-scenes work that my fellow DU administrator Elad has put into this server upgrade. It was an enormous task with a huge learning curve and many sleepless nights, and it's not over yet. I am grateful for and extremely impressed by all of his hard work.

And while we're on the topic of things that happen behind the scenes that go unnoticed...

Back in October of 2014 Google changed their search algorithm and over the following three months DU saw a 41% decline in search traffic and a related 38% decline in ad revenue. The good news is that we have spent much of 2015 clawing our way back up, and for the first time in a long time we we have seen both our traffic and our ad revenue gradually increasing over the course of an entire year. (Yay!) The bad news is that we started from a significant deficit, and for the first time ever we will not break even for the year.

That means that 2015 is the first year that Democratic Underground cannot afford to pay a year-end bonus to Elad, who worked so hard on the server upgrade, or to EarlG who works just as hard but on more obvious things like the Pic of the Moment and various forum administration duties.

So I am asking you, in the spirit of the season, to please consider re-upping your DU subscription a little early this year or maybe kicking in a couple extra bucks.

Just click here to help out: http://www.democraticunderground.com/star

Thank you, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

David Allen
DU Administrator

Artificial intelligence passes the Turing test of penmanship

The learning gap between humans and machines is closing.

Sanskrit, Tibetan, Gujarati, and Glagolitic were among 50 handwritten languages researchers used to test a computer program that proved to be as good, or better, than humans at recognizing the figures – a cognitive step for machines, and a leap forward for the potential that coders could build more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the future.

The program, developed by three researchers whose findings were published last week in Science, can recognize handwritten drawings after only viewing the figures a few times and also passed a basic Turing test.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1213/Artificial-intelligence-passes-the-Turing-test-of-penmanship

Star Wars pancakes.

Will Ferrell as George W. Bush on SNL 12/13/15

*** DU will be down for an extended period of time starting Saturday 12/12 @ 8PM ET ***

Our long-awaited DU server upgrade is finally happening this weekend. Elad and the other admins have been working hard the last few months to prepare to move the site into a new, cutting-edge web server -- just in time for the 2016 presidential campaign.

We have a massive amount of data we need to move over to the new server, and a long list of other things to do, so you should expect the site to be offline for an extended period of time. Downtime will begin at 8PM ET (5PM PT), and will likely continue through Sunday and possibly into Monday.

We have made every effort to make the transition as smooth as we can. But once the site is back online we will undoubtedly encounter some unexpected glitches and bugs. Hopefully they will be minor (fingers crossed). We want to thank you in advance for your patience, and for your help identifying any problems.

Skinner, EarlG, and Elad
DU Administrators