OT: Forum Downtime : Evening of Tues Dec 02 2014

[markc]

We'll be performing update #1 (of two) of the forum's software tomorrow, Tuesday Dec 02, starting around 8 or 9pm. Hopefully it won't take more than an hour or so.

Nothing radical/new. Simply preparation for a more important update #2, which will follow a few days later (provided things seem stable).

That second update will make our forum *MUCH* more mobile-friendly. One downside : If you are a fan of the "SubSilver" forum style, and selected it as your default via the preferences that are available under User Control Panel.... Well, I'm afraid the style has finally been discontinued by phpBB. Everyone will be "ProSilver" after the second update. This will be a bit jarring for the few users who use SubSilver, sorry about that.

There is lots of forum-goodness on the horizon after the second update. But more about that later!

MarkC

[markc]

Ok... So that "one or two hours" was a wee bit optimistic, sigh.

We're skating pretty close to the disk-space limit of our web hosting package (hoping to delay an upgrade until we're officially a 501(c)(3) again, because non-profits get a price break), so that makes forum updates a little tricky. Our provider's HelpDesk was offline when I ran into a snag last night, so that meant I couldn't return to the upgrade until this evening. Sorry about the unexpectedly long downtime.

On the plus side : Good practice for update #2

[chgpa]

Oh, and my apologies to the sub-Silver fans.... I disabled that style with update #1 rather than with #2, because it will make the second (more significant) update less risky,

[chgpa]

Ok... So there's another impact.... Our interim, somewhat-mobile-friendly solution of the past couple of years is broken with update #1.

I'd prefer not to reinstate that interim hack, because update #2 introduces 'native' support for mobile devices, and it should be much better than what we've had previously.

The weekend looks pretty cr@ppy, so my plan is to install update #2 on Sat or Sun. If it doesn't go well, I'll reconsider and reinstate the hack.

But my hope is that all will go well, and that we can live with the no-mobile 'desktop' style for a couple of days.

MarkC