People who have been with us since the start will know that here at RRO, considering we have a budget that consists of a packet of crisps & a luncheon voucher, have always pushed the technical envelope to give you the best possible experience. We were the first to broadcast at 320kpbs (and are still one of the few in the world that do), and created the Forum to deliver enhanced interactive (or at least, audio-visual interaction) experience. We had a great news magazine and a blog and lots of goodies.

Sadly, the tech companies decided that they would get together and slowly destroy third party media platforms, meaning more and more of our time was spent constantly making sure we could keep our platform working. They kept changing drivers, codes, the rules, whatever they could, and each time we managed to create work arounds and solutions.

But then WIX decided that they didn't need to listen to their users and joined in the tech race to introduce as many features and updates as they could to "stay ahead of the competition"! Rarely however, were these features and applets needed, welcomed or even fully working. Our newsletter applet was dropped and replaced without warning, and without an obvious migration path. The blog app, likewise, was dropped and replaced. Not updated, replaced. There was a limited migration tool, but this new blog, whilst more powerful, was more tricky to use.

And then there was the Forum. Our beautiful, ground-breaking Forum, an app that we worked closely with the development team on. Until someone in Wix took the decision to fold the Forum support and development team into the central business. Someone at the top of that central business took the decision to make the Forum work like Facebook. And lo and behold, they succeeded, cos it is now as unreliable and as unusuable as FB is, especially in a live context.

We've also had MIXXX updates that didn't work, undid years of collaborative work on stability and memory usage. Ubuntu had a massive update that killed off many applets we relied on. And don't even get me started on Windows... We've had floods, outages, network switching, fires, illness, gas and plumbing issues, cut cables, updates destruction of hardware, licences fees increases & conditions changed, and more. And all of it seemed to create a perfect storm from around October last year to the last week or so.

So, where does this leave us?

• MIXX. Mixx is relatively stable again, on all platforms (Windows, Ubuntu and Apple). Yay! That means we can restore the proper DeePlay we hope (see next point), and give you, to start with, 12 days with no repeat song, and build back to the 30 days we once had.

• DeePlay. Windows dropped support for older ethernet cards. They didn't tell anyone of course. They also change sound drivers with almost every update without asking. Both of these caused us issues in the last 6 months as we constantly scrambled to repair the damage updates were doing. We now think we are relatively stable in our servers to go back to proper DeePlay. As I have 3 shows this week over Wednesday and Thursday, we are going to switch the server back to 24/7 play and see what happens. If we get through to Monday then we are back!

• The Website & Forum. Until I withdrew and cancelled all my various web subscriptions and renewals (not just for RRO but ALL), WIX did not take our concerns seriously. It was always our problem or someone's cause... now they have started to fix some of the issues, but the trust is broken. To that end, when our current web subscription ends at the end of March, we are looking to move platforms. There will be no disruption to our Players, but at this stage we don't know whether we will have a fully functioning Forum app, Newsletter app, or even a multipage website. We should be able to give updates on this by the end of February.

So there you have it. Where we stand at the moment. But, as always, we keep sane by playing that there rock music for you. And that, we will continue to do. So bear with us for the next few weeks as we test, retest, migrate, rebuild and recreate. Because they can't stop the POWER OF THE RAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

It is the way.