An Explantion and a Plan Ofsorts

Hi guys, I’ve finally found some time to sit down and write this. I know some of you are confused and discombobulated by recent changes to Script Revolution, and rather than email everyone individually, I think it’s best to have one post that tries to cover it all.

First, a bit of a history lesson on Script Revolution’s development. In 2016, I was freelancing as a web designer and attempting to break into screenwriting. What I saw was a lot of people giving up because they felt breaking in was a pay-to-play deal, and an expensive one at that. I felt I might have the skills to jump in and create something any screenwriter could use to put their work out there, where it could be found by others. I didn’t know code, but I did know how to build reasonably complex sites. Building Script Revolution was a huge learning curve for me, one of the steepest in my life, but thanks to a Content Management System (CMS) I adopted for its core, I was able to cobble something together.

Nine years later, my head has barely stopped spinning. I’ve checked every new logline and user account while tackling crisis after crisis in the background as the site has grown into a beast. During this time, I’ve taken on all the web development work myself, learning what I needed to learn, and building my skills in the process. Script Revolution would have been unable to exist if this hadn’t been the case, and part of the reason I was able to do that was my living situation, which afforded me a lot of time to get the work done.

However, I became aware that the core CMS I’d built the site on was going to be dropped by the developers, and that started what’s been a living nightmare that spans years. You see, the key issue was the lack of a reliable upgrade path. The data and code behind Script Revolution are immense, plus there are things like a subscription system that are critical to its survival. The CMS developers had left users like me hung out to dry, although there were hints that an easier and more reliable upgrade path might materialise. The census was to hang on as late as possible under the assumption that something would be implemented, but it wasn’t.

This is a situation that can’t be taken lightly. No more security updates and bug fixes puts a site in jeopardy of hackers and spammers. This isn’t something you can just ignore. I was trapped between a rock and a hard place. I couldn’t stand still and risk the site becoming insecure, but then doing something was a huge technical exercise well beyond my confidence level.

So, I resigned to the fact I was going to have to pay someone a lot of money to try and do it for me, or admit defeat and bring the site to a close. Script Revolution is not run by a millionaire. It does not have venture capitalist funding. It’s kept lean so it can maintain its integrity.

I did some research and reached out to specialists who could help. The estimates were horrific, but I was able to form an agreement with a freelancer in Sweden who felt that, with me doing a lot of the legwork, they could do it within budget. A contract was signed, payments were made, and the plan was to have a new version of Script Revolution launched with a new core by Christmas 2024 - you may even remember me mentioning something was about to happen in one of the newsletters.

But nothing did happen. It transpired that, despite my making payments on time and being told all was going to plan, nothing much was actually being done. There were lots of promises of work starting imminently, and I’d get excited, but then silence. The deadline for the end of support passed, and I was able to find a service provider who offered extended security support, but that support turned out to be both costly and subpar.

Then the gut-punch came. On the day the developer promised they would start, they messaged me to say we needed to have a difficult conversation. Difficult was an understatement. They told me they needed twice as much money and until the rest of the year, at least, to get the job done. So, at that point, I had a site built on an out-of-date core, was paying for security support, had handed over all my savings to a guy in Sweden, and now didn’t have a path forward. Talk about being in the belly of the whale. That was March this year, and it genuinely looked like Script Revolution might be over.

So, while I worked on getting the funds back in a way that didn’t require a plane ticket and a baseball bat, I took one desperate last deep dive into what I could do myself and took on a lot of advice. What followed was a week so intense I felt like my head might explode, and lots of paths tried led to lots of dead ends, but I discovered there was a CMS I could get a lot of data into cleanly myself, which meant a specialist certainly could.

Back on the search I went, this time determined to stay with someone in the same country but limited by the fact this was even more of a niche request than before, and I found an agency in London that wanted stupid money again (even after admitting they’d never even done this particular type of migration before) and an agency only an hour away from me who said, “yeah, no problem”.

Wait! What? “No problem”. After all this time, someone was actually coming back with something positive. Then the quote came in, and it was affordable. I had to pinch myself.

It was now June, and the onus was clear. Get a new site up and running with the old data ASAP. Minimal downtime so people’s scripts stayed live. That meant a cutback site with the essentials, but with all the data migrated in the background.

So, in the first week of September, timed perfectly to ruin my birthday, the version of the site you are using now was launched with a whole new engine behind it. 

Now, this is a bit of a shitty position for a site owner to be in, to be honest. You are basically offering your users a site that looks mostly the same, with new bugs, and sections switched off. I’m first to admit it doesn’t look great, but I want to jump for joy in terms of what it means behind the scenes.

There’s still a way to go, and a lot of that work is invisible. I was up at 1am this morning fixing one issue after spending all yesterday fixing another. You have to remember that there’s basically nine years' worth of development work to re-implement. At the moment, I’m doing a huge clear-up of redundant code and unnecessary data. All this uncovers new bugs that need to be ironed out.

And here’s the rub: every time I turn to a specialist for the bits I can’t do, there’s a cost. I deliver car parts part-time, and a whole day fighting traffic equals just one hour of development work. Plus, my personal life has changed radically. I have my own place. I have a relationship. I have hobbies. I have a social life. I have movies to write and produce.

So, please bear with me. Sections of the site are switched off with the intention that I’ll get round to them in time. When, I can’t say, because I simply don’t know what I’ll be tackling. I’m just glad to get through what’s been a couple of years of sleepless nights, worrying how I was going to keep Script Revolution going.