March brings some exciting and long-awaited updates to MCC Media. For one, updates were made to the website. These changes simplified the process to submit an announcement and added other safeguards to protect against bots and spammers. As well as this, the new recorded sermons page rolled out. We used to record and sell the sermons on CDs, but now you can access them at any time, for free, on the website. We hope that these changes will overall smooth out the process to get announcements up onto the screen and allow people to revisit sermons from past weeks.
The form submission process has been streamlined and made more reliable. In the old system, problems would arise when submitting the form. We relied on an external script, so if a secure connection to that server could not be made for any reason, the submission would fail. The problem was that this was not immediately obvious to the end-user.
As well as this, many spam submissions would make it through the form. These spam submissions would clog up our servers and, in the end, make it challenging to find the legitimate announcements. To combat this, we added a reCAPTCHA. Being very difficult for bots to solve, the reCAPTCHA effectively eliminated any spam we might receive through the form. This required a ground-up rework of our submission system, as now we had to have processing occur on the backend, which would ultimately submit the form data.