The Flat Earth Society
The Flat Earth Society => Announcements => Status Notices => Topic started by: xasop on December 21, 2013, 08:54:22 PM
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The Flat Earth Society Forum and Wiki will be down for maintenance for up to an hour, starting at 08:00 UTC on 2013-12-22.
For convenience, this means:
EST (USA east coast):
2013-12-22, 03:00
UTC (UK):
2013-12-22, 08:00
AEST (Australia east coast):
2013-12-22, 19:00
I don't expect to use the full hour, but I'm scheduling this window to allow for the unforeseen.
The intent is to switch to using our git-tracked forum source (http://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=985.0) in production, which is going to be hosted under a separate account on the same VPS which is better-managed for deployment. This will also enable us to test changes before deploying them, resulting in less unexpected downtime when things break.
Since SMF is really dumb about the way it stores its configuration, this will involve dumping, editing and re-importing the database to change a bunch of stuff to account for the new setup. I'm also taking advantage of this window to install OS security updates on the VPS hosting the forum and wiki, which is why the wiki is also affected.
I will be putting up a static maintenance page during the cutover to inform visitors of the situation and when the website is expected to be operational again.
Thank you for understanding.
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Moved the time two hours earlier, as that's less disruptive for my schedule (and thus I can give this 100% of my attention when the time comes).
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Thank you for the advance warning good sir.
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We're now back up and running, and not a single post was lost that day!
As previously stated, this codebase is slightly different from the old one, so some things might not quite work. Please let me know if you notice any problems.
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One consequence of this move is that the happy-new-year forum theme has been removed. We've been making loads of changes to the tintagel_fes and Christmas_Season_2 themes to make them work with our modifications to FES, and will be continuing to maintain those to work with future versions of SMF. The other available themes are maintained by SMF itself; they come with the core distribution, and will be updated when a new version of SMF is released.
happy-new-year was unmaintained and subject to bit rot. If somebody else is willing to take on maintainership of that or any other theme, I'm happy to include it, but not if it's only going to sit there and break every time we make a change to the forum software. Providing a theme which doesn't work with our forum software is worse than useless; it gives users the apperance of choice, only to confuse them when they try to use an alternative.
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My avatar disappeared.
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My avatar disappeared.
Wow, that was silly of me. I forgot to update the attachments after updating the database.
Fixed, let me know if you see any other issues.
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My avatar disappeared.
Wow, that was silly of me. I forgot to update the attachments after updating the database.
Fixed, let me know if you see any other issues.
Thank you, good sir.
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I'd also like to clarify what this means for the future.
Previously, things have seemingly randomly broken while PizzaPlanet or myself was making changes to the forum. Now, with the code managed in git, we can easily spin up any number of identical staging environments to experiment with.
PizzaPlanet and I already each have our own staging environment to test changes, and we'll make sure things work there before we roll out the changes to here, so your everyday posting will no longer be impacted by us making untested changes.
Anyone else who wants to contribute to the forum codebase, the source is available on GitHub for you to do so. Please contact me if you aren't comfortable setting up your own environment based on this code, and I can arrange one for you.