Upcoming Downtime: Monday, May 12

[Serilliant]

Althanas will be upgrading its forum software on Monday, May 12. Because of the number of new features and coding changes included in the newest version, it is likely that some of our custom hacks will be incompatible. As a result, I will be taking the forum offline for part the day while I backup and double-check everything.

I hope for things to go smoothly and to get everything back and running as quickly as possible. I highly recommend planning ahead for this downtime. Remember that you can always write posts in a word processing program and then copy and paste them to the forum when it returns.

All threads and posts will migrate to the new version. There will be no loss of data, and no need to re-register.

Please let me know if you have any questions. See you in the next version!

[Zook Murnig]

Will there be any possible way to leave up an archived version of the site, so that we can bide our time with reading old threads (and so judging can continue during the downtime)?

[Raelyse]

2 questions:

What will the new version do and how long is "part of the day?"

[Serilliant]

During the downtime, the archive will still be viable at http://althanas.com/world/archive/

The new version doesn't "do" a lot other than provide a lot of great backend functionality for me. It does add some new common social networking features (like a group management system similar to Facebook's that we may use for Powergroups), and some other fun things, too. I'll be rolling out each new addition one-by-one as we figure out what works best with the site.

"Part of the day" may be as short as about 15 minutes, or it may be the entire day. It depends a lot on how smoothly the installation goes and how many of our tweaks continue to work. I'm confident that I have caught most of the variable and coding changes and know how to bring everything up to date, but you never know when something might get wonky. If things are taking too long, I may reopen the site with a few warnings (like to submit threads manually rather than through the submissions form).

[Serilliant]

The update has gone off with no (apparent) hitches. If you spot any bugs, please report them in this thread: http://althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=15980

[A Nony Mouse]

So any listing of the changes we can see?

[Serilliant]

Not yet. I will be announcing the new features one-by-one as we decide to use them and enable them.

In the meantime, you can check out the new stylings of the user profile.

[A Nony Mouse]

cool, thanks Serilliant.