System Update for Unicode Links

We just pushed out a major system update which touches upon almost every area of the site. The update allowed us to fix problems with category titles only containing non-Latin based characters such as those from most Asian countries and also introduced support for all accented letter in our auto-generated story links to improve search engine indexing by the likes of Google.

Due to the scope of the changes, please report to us any and all broken links that used to work before these updates.

Changes:

1. Allow categories to be created and accessible using only non-Latin characters. (Improved multi-lingual support)
2. Allow auto-generated story, forum, and community links to contain non-Latin based characters and Latin characters with accents.  (Improved multi-lingual support)

Fixed

• There was a problem with forum posting for about 30 minutes yesterday due to a 3rd party software bug of which we are continuing to investigate.

 

System Upgrade

There will be an approximately 10 minute site downtime while we perform a scheduled upgrade/reboot to some networking hardware.

UPDATED 4:13AM UTC-7 US Pacific Time: Reboot complete and everything is back online.

 

Scheduled Downtime for Database Upgrades: Reviews

At 2AM, August 29th, GMT-7 US Pacific Time, the reviews database cluster will be undergoing scheduled upgrade. During this maintenance period, the review feature will be unavailable. Scheduled downtime is estimated at 15 minutes.

UPDATED 2:09AM. Upgrade completed and reviews now back online.

Changes

• You can now view Private Messages from users that have the PM feature disabled. Previously, once a user has disabled PM, their messages went into hidden mode.
• PM messages are now displayed in a  more traditional layout. Previous floating chat mode created problems for some browser and very wide monitors.

 

PM Down For Upgrades

5:03AM GMT – 7:00 US Pacific Time

PM feature is currently offline for upgrades. Estimated return time is 15 minutes.

UPDATED: 5:12AM. PM feature is back online. Upgrade complete.

 

Forum/Avatar Features Down For Upgrade

2:50AM GMT – 7:00 US Pacific Time

Forum and Profile Avatar features are currently offline. Estimated return time is 10 minutes.

UPDATED: 3:03AM. Everything is back online.

 

Database Upgrades In Process

We are currently performing a rolling upgrade to our database clusters. During this upgrade window, the following areas may exhibit data inconsistencies and/or errors for a few minutes at a time.

Effected Areas:

• Forums
• Private Messages (PM)
• Image Manager/Covers
• Profile Avatars