The Admin's Blog

I suppose some of you noticed our 14 hour outage Monday afternoon into early Tuesday morning. It seems the site is growing, which is a good thing. The bad news is that it’s starting to outgrow our hosting plan and our provider shut us down when some of the backend processes took up too much CPU time.

For now, we’ve turned off some of the backend jobs that cause this sort of slowdown; it’s nothing that should be noticeable from a user perspective. In the near future, we’ll be doing more streamlining and will have to postpone some of the upgrades we had planned until we’re sure they aren’t going to interfere with other users on the server.

In the long term, we’ll probably have to move the site to a dedicated server in order to avoid this sort of problem in the future and bring you some of the whiz bang features we’d like to have. Unfortunately, dedicated hosting isn’t cheap and the site doesn’t make nearly enough from ads to even consider that option.

No, this is not a lead in to tell you we’re about to start charging for access. The information we currently offer will remain completely free as long as we can afford to keep the site online.

However, we may start to add some services or features that require a membership in order to subsidize the cost of the services we currently provide. There is also the possibility of an ebook for offline use. These are some of the ideas we’re kicking around as we try and figure out how to keep the site online (and free!) for you.

This is a community site, so we’re asking the community for ideas. Are there any particular features you’d like to see that you feel are worth paying for? Do you actually want an ebook for offline access? Tell us what you think!

Come Join Us!.

We have thousands of visitors each month, but very few are actually submitting sites. The majority of our listings have been submitted by a handful of loyal members. If you are a regular submitter and/or commenter, thank you! If not, we would love to know why not. We have set up a poll with some reasons that we think might be holding you back from participating in the site. If your answer was not provided or you would like to elaborate on your vote, please leave a us a comment.

In order for this site to be as complete and accurate as possible, we need your help. We submit campsites regularly, but our resources are not infinite. We actively travel around the US and Canada researching and exploring free camping areas, but we can only be in one place at a time.

Join the forum discussion on this post - (2) Posts

Hi folks,

Hopefully, not too many of you were trying to access the forums during our 5 minute maintenance window. Tonight, we took the forums down just long enough to upgrade to the latest stable release which fixed a potential security issue as well as added a few new features and interface changes.

I won’t try to list all of the new features here, but you’ll probably see a few new things. Hopefully, you won’t have to look too hard to find familiar features that have changed a tiny bit. We’ll still be making some minor changes to the forum software over the next few days, so shout if you notice something that doesn’t look quite right!

You might have seen our “Undergoing maintenance” page if you were lucky enough to try and access our page during the brief, 8 minute upgrade period last night.

While you wont see a lot of visible changes, last night’s upgrade was a very important one. I had talked about allowing users the ability to modify their own submissions and while it’s still not a go, the modifications that I made will allow me to bring that feature one step closer to release.

There are a few noticeable changes. You can now reply directly to other user’s comments. When you click on a thumbnail on a campsite’s page, you will no longer get giant images that take forever to display.

I applied a big update to the mapping interface today. The most notable things that you might see are a loading indicator and a read more link in the info window that pops up when you click on a site’s pin. There are also quite a few changes that aren’t so visible. Please let me know if you notice any bugs that I might have missed during testing.

We spent most of the day yesterday packing up camp, getting provisions and driving to our current location: Quartzsite. We stopping in last year but had missed all of the hoorah. This year, we were boondocking near by and decided to hop on over for the RV show.

While we are here, we plan on spreading the word about Freecampsites.net. If you are in town, you might catch a glimpse of our flier. All are welcome to print it out and post it.

Hope to see you at the show!

We have a few new tweaks for you today. By popular request, campsites are now displayed alphabetically at the state level. Hopefully, this will make it a little bit easier to find the site you’re looking for.

We’re continuing to speed up the delivery and caching of the site. Please let us know if you are experiencing any issues caused by the optimization.

Finally, we have added in a rating system that has been talked about for a long time. When you view a site now, you may rate it. Please only do so if you have been to the actual site. We’re not interested in collecting ratings on the quality of the post, only how you felt about the campsite. We have a few plans for this data once the community has rated enough sites to be interesting.

Welcome to the Freecampsites.net Admin weblog! This area has been created in order to improve communication with our users.

After all, you are the ones who make this site great. While there is a comments and suggestions section, as well as an announcements section of the forum, I feel those those are a little impersonal and that this is a better way to keep you informed.

I have been working on speeding up the site. I have seen a couple comments across the Internet saying that freecampsites.net is a great site, but that it’s a little slow. I had not personally noticed it, but I did do some metrics and checked out some test sites. They all pointed to the same thing: sloooow….
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