System Downtime, Maintenance

We're taking the system down tonight for a some system updates. We expect to go down around 9 (eastern) and hope to be back up by midnight. This is a pretty substantial upgrade, but the changes are almost entirely 'Under the Hood' type fixes: architecture stuff that shouldn't really impact much end user functionality. When the dust settles we expect there to be a few bugs cropping up, so please click that 'Bugs' link on the left hand menu and submit reports so we can squash them quickly. And sorry about the inconvenience. We know it will be hard to live without us for a few hours, but I figure some quality time with your friends and family might just be long overdue! (Also, for the curious, a brief summary of what the change is actually all about follows) Ok, so when I wrote the original code for Slashdot, I had these "Sections" and these "Topics". You're familiar with both I'm sure... the "Sections" are like "Apple" and "BSD". They have unique color schemes, and their own homepages. The "Topics" are specific areas of subject matter... you know them because they each have a colorful little icon associated with them... like for example the rockin 'Slashdot' logo that is attached to this story.

When I originally "designed" (I use the term loosely since evolved is more accurate) the system, "Sections" were meant to be for "Data Types"... for example "Book Reviews". A book review is fundamentally different than a Slashdot "Article" because it has extra fields like the ISBN code. At the same time I essentially coded "Skins" because each "Data Type" needed custom look & feel type stuff so that the story could actually display the unique data fields.

So when we created YRO and the BSD section and later on the Apple section, I just reused the skinning part of "Sections".. it was the easiest way to do it, but it created problems later: under the old design a story could only have one "Section"... some sections defined "Data Type" and others defined "Subject Matter" (like Apple or BSD)... thats why bsd.slashdot.org can never include a book review, and apple.slashdot.org can't include an 'Ask Slashdot'. This confounded users of our search page to no ends, to say nothing of frustrating editors who couldn't include topical stories within their appropriate section.

Undoubtedly we'll see some bugs to pop up... so please be patient and submit bug reports. We'll be wacking bugs for a few days... there's always a few of them that don't pop up until you put them in front of the half a million users on the real hardware. Thanks for understanding!

Comments

9 eastern?

[lecithin]

Thanks for the advanced notice!!!!!

Re:9 eastern?

[surprise_audit]

Might have been nice if the site could have been redirected to a static page explaining what was going on. Their ISP could probably have hosted it.

Question....

[Lurch Kimded]

9pm eastern... Whats that in GMT? ;)

Good luck with the upgrade, I hope Sod and his law stay far... FAR away.

Re:Question....

[Siva]

well, yes, but where in Daylight Savings right now...so GMT-4

So, what are the changes?

[Star_Gazer]

Taco, all you do is describe what the current design (step of evolution) is, but what are the changes?. Obviously, you will have removed those restrictions, but you don't say so. :)

Re:So, what are the changes?

[Pharmboy]

I think it means we are the beta testers, and the goal is to make it LOOK and feel the same, just different mechanically.

Believe me, anytime something isn't working right, you can just grep through the comments and find all the complains and debugging information you can stand.

How about upgrading to valid html?

[kevin_conaway]

And re-doing the layout in proper css?

Re:How about upgrading to valid html?

[Nurgled]

I have a feeling my grandparent poster wanted a machine-readable interface to the whole site, including comments, journals etc.

While that's great in theory, I know from experience that it just ends up inviting even more badly-written bots which mess up caches and hammer the site for ten minutes at a time because their authors are too incompetant to implement their own caching and stagger their requests.

Re:How about upgrading to valid html?

[DougWebb]

It's not the environment, it's the way Slash evolved. I've got a similar problem at my job; our web product started small, at a time when we were a smaller company without the 'Design and Plan and Review first, then Build it' mentality. Then it got big and popular, and lots of new stuff was grafted on, and there was never any time to rebuild it with a proper design.

I've read the Slash book, and looked at the code a bit, and I can see that the same thing happened. Just like with my product, Slash needs a proper redesign and a complete rewrite. That's a LOT of work, but once it's done, any future large-scale changes to the output will be much simpler to implement.

Re:Edit?

[Star_Gazer]

Editing posts is evil! It may seem like a good idea for fixing that stupid typo or the wrong link, but it usually ends in deleted/edited posts where people just don't stand up to their words and nobody can follow what the reason for the discussion/flamewar was.

I see it all the time on other discussion forums, it's no fun!

Re:Edit?

[Alsee]

A lot of the time you just want to fix a typo or broken tag moments after posting (even when you *did* use preview).

So how about only allowing edits so long as the post has not been modded and no one has replied yet? As far as I can see that avoids every objection to editing posts.

-

Re:Edit?

[Yorrike]

Or get rid of the circa 1997 layout.
I mean, tables? C'mon!

For a site that's constantly running stories on how people should switch to Mozilla and the like, they've decided to keep compatibility to Netscape 3.0.

No geek runs a browser so old that they have to rely on tables for layout. Get with the program, /.

Next time...

[HanB]

Please put up one page that explains that you're down and how long it will last. Little effort, great pleasure.

-- With a Henry Rollins song now in my head.

IT speaks volumes

[mindstrm]

about professionalism when slashdot is upgrading, and instead of a nice, slashdot-style page coming up saying "The system is down for maintenance".. we get a big, ugly HTTP error.

Re:Edit?

[Gherald]

"Sorry, you are not allowed to edit this comment. Either someone has replied, or it has been moderated."

Re:Can't

[drinkypoo]

google turns up a few useful-looking links on the subject of flash and freebsd. Nonetheless you're running a desktop which is marginal in popularity at best as a desktop OS and you're bitching about not having a supported version of flash player? Next you'll be complaining about a lack of mozilla for the atari 800.