a note to artists & Bidders

Thank you all so much for your patience while were getting some answers from BetterWorld. The auction site was down during the critical final period of bidding yesterday.

They say that the site glitch last night during the final 10-15 minutes of the auction was because our high traffic impacted the site’s ability to load during a server update. We just received a letter from them to send to you and you’ll find it pasted below.

Given what we are hearing from you—and from our own experience attempting to place bids—most people couldn’t bid or even load the site at all in the final ten minutes starting around 8:50pm EDT. Some did, but most received a 504 Gateway error message from the site.

That’s obviously unacceptable given that the final ten minutes are hugely significant for online auctions. Because we needed answers from BetterWorld and to make it fair for all bidders, we postponed the ending time of the auction to tonight starting at 9pm EDT.

Approaching the final hours of the auction tonight, here are some assurances we got from BetterWorld:

• Significantly, they assure us that the server error will not happen again tonight. They are also keeping their phone line open tonight during our auction close so that they can be reached directly.

• As a first step in making reparation to bidders, BetterWorld is not collecting any of the optional donations you made to them at checkout.

• The technical glitch closed bidding on some paintings even after we were able to get into the site. We will manually reopen those starting now.

• Credit cards will only be charged when the auction closes this evening. (This only happens when we manually close the auction, which we couldn’t do because we were unable to access the site as well.)

Perhaps some might be disappointed that the auction got extended—namely, those of us who had winning bids as of around 8:50pm EDT last night. I hope it reassures you to know that I (Kathleen) am among those bidders…I had a $675 bid on a gorgeous painting that’s valued at $2,500. I put the bid in a little early because I wanted to spend the final ten minutes on email answering people’s last minute questions, with the result that the site glitch left me as the leading bidder.

I hope those of you who were also leading bidders at the time of the site glitch will join me in continuing to bid enthusiastically today. To be transparent, I had some mixed feelings about being the leading bidder because of the site crash, particularly given that this isn’t an estate sale—it’s an auction where the paintings are all donated directly by 800 generous artists and 100% of the proceeds are going to Maui fire victims.

Clearly the process on BetterWorld last night was not ideal, but I do hope that last point remains the salient one for all of us. The funds are going to families who’ve had to deal with considerably more than a website glitch. But it would be failure of perspective to allow a software glitch on a server somewhere to tarnish the thousands of hours that artists devoted to making these 1,000 paintings, and the more than $450,000 that your generosity is helping bring to displaced & traumatized families in Maui. Because of artists’ generosity and bidders’ love for both Maui and original art, we are going to be able to collectively send nearly half a million dollars to people who deeply need it.

That’s a beautiful thing! With your support today, we can possibly surpass half a million dollars in aid for Maui.

Mahalo,

Kathleen