Hey everyone,

Sunday at midnight, we had scheduled some downtime for Wufoo to transfer our current setup to some new servers in another facility. We, unfortunately, ran into some unexpected problems and the downtime spilled over into this Monday morning. For that, we offer the most sincere apologies. The purpose of this message is to let you know that all accounts are now up and functioning properly, and that we are a bit embarrassed at the level of service we provided this morning.

For those of you interested in the technical details, here’s what happened. Wufoo is unique in that each form created is essentially it’s own database setup. Because of this, we have some complicated and non-traditional procedures that need to be followed when we make changes like we did today to our servers. When we moved the accounts to the new servers, the actual estimated transfer time was about 55 minutes. The first transfer completed on time, but due to our setup, certain configuration files were corrupted in the process. After that first transfer, it took us 3 additional transfers plus some digging time to isolate and fix the problem.

We’ll be the first to tell you that we have no excuses to justify all the things that went wrong today, and we have learned quite a few things from the experience. In the future, we will be running maintenance on Friday / Saturday night to prevent any chance of the work week being affected, and we will always test as much as we can ahead of time given our resources. Additionally, we’re working on a way for you to be better notified in these situations. We have to present proper error messages on your sites to keep not just you, but your users informed as well — there will be no cryptic database messages in the future from Wufoo.

Thanks to everyone who was patient and understanding while we worked on this. You guys were great. We, obviously, have a lot of work to do now, but we assure you that this isn’t a common thing for us. For our recent crop of users and customers, we hope you don’t judge us by these hiccups.

Again, we can’t thank you enough for your understanding.

We will be performing maintenance tonight, 5/13/2007, at 12 EST (midnight). The upgrade should take approximately 1 hour. The servers are coming down because we are moving to a faster, more flexible, and more reliable data center. Thanks for your understanding.

To prepare for new features such as paging, matrix fields, and PayPal integration, we had to restructure the backend of our form builder. During that process, we thought it would be nice to just go ahead and make a version 2 of the form builder while we were at it. So after some hefty performance increases, a few new features and a fresh look on the interface we have the next iteration of our form builder. Before we unleash it on everyone, we would like to do some thorough testing. That’s where you all come in — we need your help. If you would like to help us test out our new form builder, just fill out the form below:

https://master.wufoo.com/forms/form-builder-beta/

Invites will be sent out next Thursday. To satisfy everyones curiosity before then, here are two teaser screenshots to show a couple of the changes that have been made.

We’d like to take a minute to thank a few of our users for creating some great Wufoo screencasts and documentation. We really love this kind of stuff because it gives us a better view on how people are using Wufoo, and it helps us understand what we need to do a better job of explaining.

• Getting Started With Wufoo - Jeff Turner, from Activerain.com, created an awesome video overview on how to create a Wufoo form and add it to your website. We always love to hear user feedback, but when you can visually see how somebody interacts with an application, that oftentimes speaks louder than words.

• Creating a New Account - Tom, over at ScreencastCentral.com, created a short clip on how to sign up for a new Wufoo account. ScreencastCentral has hundreds of videos to “make using computers and software easier”. Tom also said there are a few more screencasts on Wufoo to come, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

• Hosting Wufoo Forms on Your Own Server - I honestly pretty tried hard to make the submit API documentation easy on the eyes and brain. That being said, I am a programmer, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t image what code, or Wufoo’s API looks like to a non-programmer. So I’d like to sincerely thank Dave Foy for writing a detailed tutorial on how to get started with the submit API. According to Dave, he “wanted to give a bit of a step-by-step walkthrough for the more, erm, programatically-challenged”. It’s definitely more in depth than my API introduction, and hopefully we’ll see some more programmatically-challenged people delve into the API.