JustGiving.com website goes titsup after upgrade

Better to give than receive

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Director, 23rd June 2009 14:49 GMT

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Update: This story originally referred to JustGiving as a not-for-profit. It is not.

Online charity outfit JustGiving has been hit by a series of major glitches since it launched a new website last Saturday morning.

The organisation admitted deployment had been less than smooth and the site continues to have a number of “teething problems” with loading some fundraising pages and accessing user logins.

PayPal, its main payment system, is also currently out of action and won’t be available on JustGiving.com until Friday at the earliest, according to a blog post on the website.

“Although it cleared all pre-deployment testing, it encountered some problems in the live website environment. We’re working on it this week and aim to have PayPal up and running again by the end of the week,” said JustGiving’s spokeswoman Heather Bird.

Confirmation emails are also failing to reach anyone who has made a donation since the site was relaunched on Saturday.

“There’s a delay with some of these emails being sent out and we’re working on fixing it now,” explained Bird. “We’ll have it solved as soon as possible, and you can expect to receive a donation receipt by the end of this week.”

The charity's CTO Dominic Lacey told The Register that the JustGiving tech team had been "taken by surprise" when the website began to experience problems over the weekend.

"Load testing didn't accurately reflect the way it's being used in the live environment," he explained.

Lacey said the charity had taken around £600,000 per day since the website upgrade was applied, which is around 20 per cent down on JustGiving's average daily donations.

He said at present the organization had seven outstanding technical issues to deal with on its site, with one remaining urgent, two high priority and the rest marked as medium or low.

JustGiving's SOA system hadn't responded well to the upgrade, according to Lacey. It's based on Microsoft's .NET 3.5 technology.

The CTO said database transactions were going through on the backend, and added that users can be assured that their donations were being received despite the ongoing errors on the website.

Meanwhile performance on the website will be sluggish while the charity’s sys admins apply updates and fixes to its servers. ®

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