Development on the new server is going about as well as any one-man team who had to keep his house from collapsing can. Which is to say not well at all. I've had to start the code from scratch three times on top of that.

None of this work, of course, is visible to you because it's all been confined to alpha testing. The actual website's been chugging along on the old host for more "just one more month now" months than I care to count.

I'm out of cash. You're out of cash. I'm out of time. Things look bad. There are a few options, listed in order from worst to best.

1. Watchtail goes offline until I get the new system working. Possibly forever. Wanna avoid this.
2. I get a thousand bucks to yank the site out of debt and keep it running until it is fixed. There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, and I truly believe this is a waste of your money.
3. I miraculously get the whole thing working in a day, recoup my losses, and you can enjoy all of the past three month's hard work. While ideal, this is so unlikely that it's not really an option at all.
4. I strip down the site to minimum functionality, shoot for a beta release, and get the new server online before ANOTHER month goes past.
5. I do step 4, and also crowd-source some of the coding work.
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About option 4. Here's what I mean when I say minimum functionality:
-The interface will be quite simplistic. No fancy gradients, scrollbars get back-burnered a bit, and no animated rollouts. Just pop-up windows, which are a lot easier to pull off with a minimum of code.
-Chat features will be drastically reduced. /me and auto-links will still exist (since that code works and there's no point scrapping it) but no mod functions or name changes. Guests will simply be prompted for a name when they first enter a room. A bit draconic, if you ask me, but the names were the #1 reason and the #1 hangup on revising the code. Getting rid of name changes also means a much, much simpler backend. Not to worry, though; I don't want that gone for good.
-I'll probably pare down the list of available room settings. Rating and public/private will likely avoid the chopping block. I'm attempting to grandfather in registered-only and room passwords, but these will probably be disabled until later on in the beta development. Lite broadcaster will be gone until I make a new one.
Remember, I'm starting from scratch here. About the only code that will survive is the chat parsing, and that's from the new code you can find in this gallery, not the one on the site. That one's in AS2 and I'm not even sure I can work in that language anymore.

About crowd-sourcing the work. I'm not hiring a developer, and I'm not making Watchtail open-source although it's a tempting thought. What I probably will do is ask for your assistance on features that aren't central to the site, asking for code snippets on scrollbars in as3 and indexed arrays in Java. That sort of thing. If interested, contact me at admin@watchtail.com.

Big changes are coming, and I don't want anyone caught unaware. If I can't pull off the best option in time, we fall through the list until I get to my worst-case scenario. Your donations can keep that from happening. Thank you for reading, and please spread the word about this.