Forum maintenance / service interruption, March 30th

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Friends,

Just to let everybody know: our website service provider has scheduled our forum servers for maintenance to install a software upgrade during the early morning of Monday, March 30th. (Techies: we're moving up to MySQL 5 from the old 4.0.27 release.)

While we won't be taking the forum, the ErrantryWiki or the main website down for this, it is possible that there will be one or more service interruptions between 2 and 7 AM EDT (UTC 0700-1200). So please take note. Any outages are expected to be short ones.

Two possible side effects of this upgrade:

(a) Other vBulletin installations have sometimes had a problem with uploaded images vanishing after an upgrade of this kind. (This refers only to images users might have uploaded to youngwizards.com itself -- images stored in the vBulletin database.) If you have uploaded images here, it would be smart to download / make copies of them before Monday, as you might possibly need to re-upload them. This particularly applies to avatars. Please save a copy of your avatar on your own computer or in your preferred online file storage space, in case we have this problem.

(b) There is also a slight possibility that after the upgrade there might be some hiccups with the way the forum database renders foreign-language characters. If this happens, we'll iron out the wrinkles in the days following the upgrade.

Once this upgrade happens, the last of our issues involved with converting the old Groupee-based database to the new vBulletin system will finally have been solved. Yay!

Thanks for your understanding, all!

[Lazy Leopard]

Good luck. I've got something similar (but involving a hosting company change as well) coming up for my local astronomical society's websites. I hope it all goes smoothly.

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Thanks! I'm hoping it goes smoothly too. Have to add a note to the message above as there's one more issue that may pop up...

[Jacq]

Hooray stored procedures. Now it will be a lightning-fast board!

(At first I was afraid this was a "hay guys we're moving to some really bloated new forum software thing that will take LONGER to load yippee!")

Good luck!

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

So the new version of MySQL has been installed, and everything seems to be working fine.

There were some display peculiarities at first, but they went away as soon as I cleared my browser caches. If anyone else runs into anything similar, the problem should go away if you do the same.

Later this week or early next we'll be upgrading the forum software to its new release, so there may be some downtime then: we'll inform everybody of when this will be as soon as we get the new files downloaded.