UPGRADES: coming very soon to our forum, wiki & website!

TOMORROW we will be doing some software upgrades, as part of our Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project. We plan to update our forum, wiki and the WordPress software which runs our website and catalogue. The new software has already been tested with all our data and systems and there won’t be many visible differences. The site will be down while we upgrade everything (otherwise we’re trying to hit a moving target, and that’s no fun.) We’ll be starting at 10am EST, and think it will take a maximum of 3 hours to do.

Check the Grand Countdown for information about your own timezone.

Q&A

? Will anyone be able to use the site while it’s being upgraded?
= NO, everything will be down. It’ll be like when we moved servers, only in hours rather than days.

? How will we know what’s happening if the site’s down?
= We’ll try to use Twitter and Facebook … and or just hit page-refresh occasionally until we come back.

? Does this affect our files at archive.org?
= No, they’ll be accessible as normal; but people won’t be able to use our catalogue to get to them.

? How long will it take?
= Depends on how much coffee our sysadmin has for breakfast. He’s asked for a 3hr window, so that’s the current estimate.

? Seriously, are there no changes in the software?
= Well, the new wiki search is much better! I don’t remember seeing anything different about the forum when I was testing (writes Cori.) For the most part, these updates are for stability and security, not functionality (that’s coming Real Soon Now. ;)