I understand your frustration.  Here's my perspective:

I volunteered my time for a period of about a year to re-develop the 
IRTC site since nobody else was stepping up to the plate.  If I was 
going to rewrite the site software, it would at least be in a language 
which I like and understand well.  That's why I chose Smalltalk.  If 
anyone else volunteers to take over the project and rewrite the code, 
you can use any language you wish.

The project became more complicated when Chris Cason expressed the 
desire to make the pages bookmarkable and google-indexable. The site was 
developed in Seaside which normally puts session keys into the URLS. 
Making the pages bookmarkable changed this policy and made the coding 
harder.  It also meant that users browsing the site without logging in 
used a new session for every page hit.

After finally making the site live and struggling to correct problems 
amidst much complaining from the community, we got the software stable 
except for one nagging problem. The web sessions are always set to 
time-out.  In order to give people enough time to submit images without 
timing out, we had to increase the timeout to 30 minutes.  But, to allow 
the site to be navigable without logging in and to be bookmarkable, 
every page view created a new session.  The combination of these two 
factors meant that lots of hits by users who weren't logged in would 
create lots of sessions and eat up lots of memory.  The application was 
chewing up too much memory and was causing problems with the server.

I'm now super busy with several contracts at once and have no time to 
volunteer any more to the IRTC.  On top of that, the number of 
submissions had dropped to about 6 per competition which meant that 
every submission won something (which is kind of meaningless).  We felt 
that the lack of interest and the memory issue was too much to keep the 
application running.

Now, if anyone out there wants to take it over, be my guest.  I can make 
all of the Smalltalk code available to you if you wish.  You can also 
re-write it in PHP or any other language you like.  I just can't spend 
more time on it because I'm already too busy working on other stuff.

I tried, folks, but the rewards were too small, the effort was too high, 
and the complaints from people not satisfied with the efforts we put in 
were too annoying.

I'd be happy to help anyone take over, but my volunteer time on this 
project is done.

David Buck

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