I joined the GDA team almost exactly 21 years ago, in the final months of my senior year of high school. I got lucky and joined just before the explosion of American Idiot, and for the next 10 years, I got experience an incredible ride. From flying all over the country for concerts and meetups to meeting Green Day at the after-party during the opening night of American Idiot on Broadway. I got to meet some incredible people along the way, other Green Day fans, and members of Green Day's team, all who were way nicer to me than they should have been. It was such a unique experience with a ton of fond memories.

About 11 years ago I had to find a real job, and as my responsibilities there grew, I had less and less time for GDA. I've been mostly absent for the last 8 years. I'd check in when someone on the team messaged me that the site was down, and I'd read the comments when the band released something. I'd pay the server bill, rarely on-time, but for all intents and purposes, there had been no active development on the site since at least 2017. News was still getting posted occasionally, but the editors had to dodge and weave all the errors on the back-end, things no longer working, databases breaking, social media accounts gone, and probably cursing my name for not doing more. But they stuck at it as best they could.

Around COVID lockdown, we started getting legal threats from some very aggressive copyright lawyers. They were not connected to Green Day, instead they represented someone who had taken photos of them for another entity. Our social media accounts got copyright claimed and we lost all our followers on Facebook, which was our primary driver for traffic. We ended up having to pay several thousand dollars and I ended up deleting entire sections of the site after that. This was a significant blow, both financially and to my morale. But year over year, we kept paying the bills, asking for help to just keep the lights on, because I stubbornly didn't want to lose the archives of news, editorials, and community that have been built here over the last 25 years. There have been some dedicated people who have helped keep things moving for no reason other than the love of the band and the community, but over the years more and more around the site broke like a house partially abandoned.

Earlier this year I saw a thread on Reddit where people were talking about how much they used to love GDA. I knew exactly how they felt, because before I ever joined the team, I remember how excited I was to dig around, find things I hadn't seen before, and read what people had to say about the stuff I cared about. Even now, with so much broken, new people were still coming to the site and referencing old pages around the internet, though obviously less than before.

So last month I decided to take some time off work and start fixing things. I started reviewing error logs (tens of thousands that accumulated), trying to fix news archives and broken news posts. I can honestly say that over the last month I've done more coding on GDA than I have in the last 10 years combined, and it's made me very excited about what we could do.

While the internet has changed immeasurably in the last 25 years, I believe there is still a place for independent fan sites. A place to carve out our own little corner of the internet without worrying that a corporation will wipe out the archives or that a billionaire is going to buy out a social media site and make it a haven for homophobic-sexist-racist-fascist assholes.

So, I'd like to welcome you back to The Green Day Authority. We've spent a lot of time in the last month fixing what used to be our most popular sections, like the Tour page and the Music section, and better integrating comments from the Green Day Community. We finally fixed navigation and a bunch of formatting for mobile devices. The music section has been updated with song meanings for Saviors, and now has an Idiot Rating on every song across the entire Green Day catalog, so you can rate each song out of 5. Music videos have been added and we'll be adding live performances to the song pages as well. The tour section has been updated with dates and setlists for the last tour, and we're starting to embed Instagram photos shared from users at the shows. We're still working on those and more, so consider it all a continuous work-in-progress.

I'd like to thank Maria, kaylubd, BeachBum, Liam, Lindsay, lizziebix, AlissaGoesRAWR, Khaleesi., and others on the team for all helping over the years in keeping GDA and GDC around. If you're interested in helping with updating content, shoot us an email, team@greendayauthority.com.

We've started cooking up a whole list of ideas of things to create or bring back, and we look forward to rebuilding our audience, fixing a lot more around the site, and reconnecting Green Day fans in our own little corner of the internet. Leave your feedback via social media or on GDC of things you'd like to see, either new ideas, updates, or something we used to do you'd like us to bring back.

Also follow us on socials as we try and rebuild, @gdauthority on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky.

- Andres