Pardon our downtime
This site experienced a little bit of (planned) downtime last night and I figure I owe it to you guys to explain what happened.
When I first signed up for this hosting service, I didn’t realize I had the choice to make between PHP 4 and PHP 5. Apparently, the default choice was PHP 4, so that’s what we got stuck with. This wasn’t a problem until I created the Supreme Commander Talk wiki. I chose to use MediaWiki as the wiki software because it’s the most popular and fully-featured, and I’m also very comfortable with it, having run two previous wikis with it. However, all MediaWiki versions since 1.7 have required PHP 5; since this hosting plan didn’t have it, I had to use MediaWiki 1.6.7, which is about nine months old now.
So yesterday I asked my hosting provider to upgrade me to PHP 5. Apparently the way that’s accomplished is by moving the site to a different server that is running PHP 5. This caused the temporary downtime; it takes time for DNS caches to be updated to point to the new server. It should be worked out by now, though. And once the site came up on the new server, I went through and upgraded the wiki to the newest release of MediaWiki, which is 1.9.3.
So everything should be up-to-date now, and I don’t foresee any necessary future scheduled downtime. Or at least not until a new major version of PHP is released, anyway, but that doesn’t happen all that often.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Additionally, there seems to be a phantom post about mass fabs which appears on the RSS feed but not on this site.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I think that’s an error in your browser’s RSS cache or something. You can go look at the RSS feed’s XML in a text viewer and there are no posts about mass fabricators.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Glad it was planned! I was a bit worried when I tried accessing the site after midnight to find it gone. :p
March 13th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
A back button or a “forwarding in three seconds” script on the page after post approval (for anti-spam) would be awfully handy.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Yeah, that phantom post was by Grokmoo, who made an incorrect discovery about how he thought he could get some serious resource boosts (turns out he just had the double resources mod on, d’oh). I’ve recommended that he issue corrections/retractions from now on out rather than deleting posts, because, as you point out, deleting posts causes problems.