First 36 hours recap - We've broken 10,000!

Wow.

Last year secret santa was big. We were on TV in Canada, were all over the press, we reached to nearly 4500 people in 54 countries ... it was amazing.

This year, in 36 hours we have passed 10,000 sign ups in 75 countries! Seriously! Check out the statistics page, you can see other redditors on the map around the world!

Here in the north pole (actually a small house in Alameda, CA) we are really sick. We have fevers, bad coughs, etc. etc. ... we blame it on being in DC last week. So it might take us a bit longer than normal to get back to your emails ... bare with us.

Here are the issues we know about and are dealing with right now:

1. We only have one server that we run redditgifts on. We had a ton of traffic yesterday and the majority of it was not passive read traffic, it was people signing up (writes to the database and api calls). So, no matter how efficient I write the code, there are only so many processes one machine can handle. We just have to deal with this, we dont make any money on redditgifts and getting more servers really just isnt an option. Sorry.

2. Emails - We send a lot of emails ... like a ton! Since yesterday we have sent more than 21,000 emails. This means that we get flagged in some systems. So, check your spam folders. Also, comcast won't even receive our emails. Do you work for comcast? please fix that!

3. Verification - Since yesterday we have had over 7400 people sign up on redditgifts as new users. For each one of these, we have to make an api call to reddit to verify that they have posted their code. Each of these calls seems to take anywhere from .5 seconds to 30 seconds. The way the code is written we can only have one process doing this at a time ... so what usually takes less than 30 minutes is now taking a long time.

plugs

This year i'll be plugging this stuff from time to time.

donations - We're hoping that some of you will say thanks for the hard work, or something, and help our local schools here. We could really use the help.

coupons - We have set up a few coupons for you guys this season, so keep them in mind if you want to use one of these fine retailers for your gifts.