This past week, the website experienced some performance problems. As website availability is of utmost importance to us, this update is to let you know what happened and what we've done to address it.

This past week, the site was unavailable on Monday around 7-9pm, Friday from 3-4pm and 7-7:30pm CST. There were some other areas of brief slowdowns as well.

The first problem on Monday occurred as John was traveling back from the Daytona National Breeders Reptile Expo. Unfortunately he misdiagnosed the problem as a shortage of web servers and the steps taken to remedy the issues made it worse leading to the 7-9pm outage.

Since then we identified the actual problems relate to our database. As a result we have:

• Upgraded the DB to give it more resources
• Reduced size of the DB, deleting old and unused data
• Are working optimizing some slow queries and limiting long queries

Other than one 5 minute period from maintenance, the site has been running very smoothly since Friday night. We believe that all of these issues have been sufficiently addressed for now and have learned a few lessons in the process.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the downtime.

John & Team

John is Daytona bound! Can't wait to hang out with reptile family at the National Reptile Breeders Conference. I'll be spending about half the weekend manning the MM table solo, and the other half walking the room. Please seek me out and bring some feedback -- the good, bad and ugly.

We just added not 1, not 3, not 5, but TWELVE NEW top-level categories! All of these were subcategories that we promoted to full category status. For these herps you can now enjoy all the functionality that makes finding amazing animals so easy on MorphMarket, including ads indexed by trait tags, subcategories, store directories, and calculators.

The newly minted categories are:

• Snakes: Sand Boas, Rat Snakes
• Geckos: Gargoyle, Leachianus, Fat-Tailed, Chahoua
• Lizards: Skinks, Monitors, Iguanas
• Amphibians: Axolotls, Tree Frogs, Dart Frogs

Fun facts about the increases:

• New top-level categories: 12, which is +50% (from 25 to 37)
• New subcategories added: 67
• New genes/traits: 370
• New calculators: 12, which is +133% (including 5 calculators for existing categories)

You might wonder, how did we choose these categories? It was data-driven, based on quantity of ads listed. Occasionally, we add new subcategories to group ads which are in the "other" buckets. For instance, during this upgrade we also added several new Other Python subcategories for Pygmy, Scrub, Spotted and Water Pythons. And then, larger subcategories become candidates for promotion to top-level categories as we have done today.

We do not claim that our data is perfect, but we are always updating and improving it and we welcome your feedback. The best place for input is in our community subforum which has a form that you can fill out.

Special thanks to so many who provided input including Kylie Koskan, Doug Kulie, Anthony Vasquez, Macie Lewis, Sharon Kay Strohl, Matt Horton, and many others.

If you have ads in these new categories, you might want to review them to make sure the appropriate traits tags have been added. You can add tags by modifying the ads and updating the traits field with the relevant tags.

We hope you enjoy these changes. We are all about improving our data, design and functionality to be the best online resource for connecting the community of herp lovers. We'd love to know what you think in the comments below.

The latest newsletter is now available. It includes the new Messenger, our Moderation Policies, an interview with Snakes and the Fatman, and more!

Other notes:

• We'll be at the Daytona, FL expo next weekend, come and see us!
• We have restocked shop.morphmarket.com and added new items as well.

These emails are sent to all active sellers within the last year, but we will always publish them to our blog also.