When we recently experienced web site performance issues, we temporarily removed the mission listings. We have now added the link back. We will monitor performance to see if this causes issues again, but we believe we’ve taken the right steps to stop the issue from returning. A technical explanation is given at the end of this announcement for those interested.

If you are a visitor to the site, the mission listings are found using the menu option Upcoming Missions on the lower menu, next to About Us.

Members & State Pages

If you are logged in as a member, the option is found under the Members menu; but we recommend you use your State Listing instead of the full listing. This will load quicker, and still give you a link to the month listing.

Filtering by State

When on the month view of missions, viewers can filter the list to only show a particular state by using the State filter button, and selecting the state you’re interested in.

Performance Issues

We discovered that the mission listing has been affecting performance of the web site for quite some time, but recently they issues became severe enough that the site was virtually unusable. Working with our hosting and firewall companies, we narrowed the issue down to web crawler bots searching the site to index it. With hundreds of thousands of missions listed on the site, this was causing excessive load on the database.

We have taken steps to mitigate this by limiting bots searching mission data. We will monitor the situation to ensure that reintroducing the links does not cause a return of the problem.