Two Thousand Activities!

Recently the site crossed another milestone: there are now over two thousand activities on ALTopedia!

Looking into the numbers a little further, these activities have come from 229 different user accounts, although the Englipedia Archive collects activities from dozens, if not hundreds of teachers as well. Some of these archived activities date back a good 10 or 15 years!

I'd like to thank everyone who's taken time out of their days to share their work and ideas here. One philosophy that I try to follow with the site is that there isn't one perfect classroom activity for a given lesson or theme. Every class and teacher is a unique combination of personalities and experiences, and what might work great in one class with one teacher might not go over well at all in another class with another teacher. The goal with the site is to give people a wide variety of options that they can adapt to their circumstances.

This wouldn't be possible without a lot of different people voluntarily sharing their experiences, so if the site is useful for you, it's because it's the product of everyone working together.

As far as other news goes, there's now a user dashboard which I've been working on lately. You can check it out now if you're logged in, but I'm still tinkering with it. The goal is that it gives you a quick overview of what's happening on the site.

A lot of users were having issues with the Captcha system on the sign-up page. I'm trying out a new system which should hopefully be more reliable. I put it in place because spam bots will automatically sign up to any site that doesn't deliberately try to stop them, and I remember in the days before the Captcha I might have to delete as many as a dozen of those accounts per day. Please let me know if you're still experiencing sign-up issues.

As I've mentioned before, my intent is to pay for the site by having a subscription-based system where your account can have access to extra features if you subscribe. I've hit another snag recently regarding registering a business address, so this might still be a little ways out. In the meantime, please check out Patreon or Ko-fi to help support the site. You'll be able to use the Lesson Tracker, which is in active development.

I mentioned some server issues in my last post, but I finally got to the bottom of them (it turned out that the server was constantly trying to find some resources that didn't exist) and it should be back to normal now.

There's much more to come, but as always, please let me know what you think!