By: Rune Evensen. January 15th 2018

From wikipedia:

A community is a small or large social unit (a group of living things) who have something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity. Communities often share a sense of place that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community. People tend to define those social ties as important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions like family, home, work, government, society, or humanity, at large.[1][2] Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties (micro-level), “community” may also refer to large group affiliations (or macro-level), such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.[3]

The word “community” derives from the Old French comuneté, which comes from the Latin communitas “community”, “public spirit” (from Latin communis, “shared in common”).[4]

Human communities may share intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

This is so very true within the COSS Community. Last night, or should I say this morning we launched our new UI. After a 5 hour scheduled maintenance period, we still faced a 3 hour delay. So approximately 2am Singapore time we went live.

Instantly thousands of people logged in at the same time and the amount of concurrent users went through the roof, and I guess I dont even have to say what happens then……. slow site, overload etc. Not only that, but we also launched 4 new tokens for listing, each of them with two pairs and 3 of them with trading promo. Upon first login after a new listing the system generates new wallets for these new tokens, so add that exercise to the already overloaded site and you understand what we were dealing with last night.

Was the launch a huge success? NO, not even close. In order to not face any further delays the UI went live with some missing features, bugs (even after extensive testing) , but what happened then? Our community instantly opened up reddit posts where users could report their views, errors and bugs found, suggestions to improvements and even solutions to issues.

Not sure if I even should say this, but my wording to the 2 Dev team during and after the launch was not suitable for kids, and the frustration just kept growing as we discovered more and more errors. At around 6am this morning, I had to throw in the towel for the day and get a couple of hour sleep. Dev decided to split up their time also with a few of them going to sleep after conducting a marathon day of going 33 hour straight. Needless to say that no programmer/developer is at its best after 33 hours with no sleep and under tremendous pressure. I comforted them from time to time by letting them know that they only get hammered by me, while I were hammered by thousands. Not sure that helped a lot though :-) At the end of the day, whether what they deliver is good or bad, it is my responsibility. It is my current role to hire and to fire, so any delay, any error, and any lack of communication, whether it is from Dev, finance, support or any other department. The responsibility is mine.

In our various channels we have moderators and they are doing a fantastic job. Do have in mind that these are volunteers, and should not by any means have to face any form of verbal abuse from other users because of company faults. If anyone absolutely have to blow of some steam and show some frustration, come to me (during office hours please) :-) and do not take it out on any of our moderators and/or staff.

Last night was completely crazy. and yes we had to use the famous ban hammer a couple of times in our telegram groups, but again this came widely supported by our fantastic community. Our community rules are pretty simple: BEHAVE or BE GONE. Show respect and be polite. Yes there can be frustration from time to time, but that is no reason to lose all common sense and to behave irrational. We should all stand together and then we will also all grow together. That is how any community survives.

With the current userbase counting 97,285 trading accounts on COSS.IO I estimate that we will hit 100K either during today or latest by tomorrow. This is a huge milestone for us, and to reach 100K on or around 16th of January when our goal for 2018 was 250K users is nothing short of amazing. The growth is also because of our community. They write articles, reviews, share their thoughts with others and they are actively out there promoting coss.io to new potential users and community members.

Although we all are amused by the many meme’s made by users it sometimes becomes to much and the same goes for the price checking BOT’s we have on telegram. Also here the community made their voices heard and the channels becomes very much self-regulated because of this. Again it boils down to showing respect to fellow users. Most do, some don’t. And as we grow the problems wont decrease, but if we continue to work together as we do, II am confident that we can overcome any challenge in our way.

To show our gratitude to the community, we will plan for a big COSS party to be held in Singapore this coming June. There will be entertainment, charity auction, dinner, drinks and a lot of fun. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some promo’s presented as well. More info to come at a later stage on this topic. Right now our main focus is to get things right, and we will stop at nothing to reach there.

Thank you kindly for your support.

Dear COSS community: I LOVE YOU ALL.

Kind regards

Rune Evensen