Site Update Sanctum Maintenance - Wednesday September 12th

[JamesMartin]

Hello Sanctum Dwellers,

On Wednesday September 12th, the site will be going down temporarily for maintenance and necessary updates. This will be occurring in the afternoon for European users and morning for those in the Americas, precise time is not currently decided.

Update (2018/09/11) : Official time is now set for tomorrow at roughly 9 PM EST. Alerts will be sent to inform users of the exact start time (details below).

Why?

This is being done for two reasons; Firstly, an update for the site software is needed. Secondly, to accommodate the site's rapid growth, we have decided to make the switch to a larger server which will provide the site with more resources. This should enable us to not only function with more users and fewer errors, but also to enable some more resource intensive add-ons that we do not currently have extra resources for.

What users need to know:

In order to accomplish this process as quickly as possible, we will be creating a clone of the site at a certain point on the 12th—this will allow us to upload that clone to the new server and switch over to it, limiting site downtime. However, this WILL create a period where the site is up, but new content is not being included in the clone. While we will make every effort to make sure this content is transferred before the new site is live, we cannot make a guarantee. Thus, before the clone is made, we will be sending out a site-wide alert to all users. At this point, we STRONGLY recommend that you either immediately post any in-progress drafts for later editing or copy them into a word processor for continued work, so no issues arise in edge-cases.

Ideally, this entire process should take an hour or two. Just in case, I strongly recommend you follow us on social media using the links found here. We will be posting updates as needed during the downtime and let you know when it starts and when it's over. You can also use this to contact staff with any questions during this period. Also, you can just follow us for our charming personalities, quality memes and excellent senses of humour :)

Thank you, everyone, for your understanding and here's to making the Sanctum bigger and better than ever!!!

Best Regards,

Your Inner Sanctum Administrative Team
​

P.S: We have now enabled an add-on that allows users who are concerned about their content to export their threads easily. Open a thread, look under "thread tools" and select "Export Thread", it will be opened in a format that is easily copy-pasted into any word processor. Please note there might be graphical issues with the text and background colours feature on some themes—if this occurs, please let a staff member know what theme you are using so it can be rectified.

 

[Otys]

UPDATE:

The Forum and all database has been moved to the new Server. The software has been updated.
What we need to do now is connect the new server to our domain and synchronize all new data from this morning, basically before we started working on it. This will take 5-10 minutes work, BUT it will take some time (between an hour and 24 hours - worst case scenario) until everything reconnects and updates itself.

What this means for users? You will see a maintenance message, once I hit the switch off, so we can synchronize and make sure everything is copied and nothing is lost. However, you will need to WAIT. It's advised you clear your cash, etc etc. It shouldn't take much time, but it all depends on what is stored on your computer and router, also how fast the new server will reconnect.

Please follow the facebook for updates IF something goes wrong, and you can contact us on our e-mail: writerssanctumstaff@gmail.com

So far, everything went according to plan. See ya all in a bit

 

[Otys]

Final Update on this:

Everything is completed now and everyone should be moved over to the new server.

What's new?
+We are now housed on a bigger and faster server. Hopefully no more slow downs on Saturday night and peak hours. Hopefully.
+We are no longer troubled for resources and usage, so now we can add some new and cool addons
+Software was upgraded to the newest version, taking care of some minor bugs, and the new GDPR rules (The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years)
+We now have an SSL certificate. If you go on Inner Sanctum Roleplaying it should show it as secure and with a valid certificate. The reason it's not showing it now, is because even if one link or one picture comes from a source without said certificate, it won't show on ours either. (That's WIP for us)

Everything went as smoothly as I hoped. However we did experience some weirdness, people jumping from one server to the other, some lost posts. I do apologize for that.

What happened was, that we downloaded all data from the old server, uploaded it to the new one and upgraded the software. At this point the old server was completely opened for users, but was to be closed, so we could synchronize the remaining data (everything that would have been posted in the past 5 hours). However, something went wrong here, and the old server remained opened. That shouldn't have happened.

Of course we had no idea about this, as it looked closed on this side, so we proceeded with synchronizing and connecting the new server with our domain name (the address). That happened really fast and indicated in about 10-15 minutes that the site is now loading from the new server. This is where the waiting game begins, for every single device to figure out that this address is now pointing to a different place - usually this can take anything between minutes and 72 hours. Most browsers and devices keep some information (cookies, you always have to agree with nowadays) to make the experience faster, and it takes them some time to decide and search for the address fresh. So, for some users it happened in the matter of minutes, for some it took 24+ hours.

Now, if you are one of those that had lost a post, please let me know and I will try to go back in the old server and hand retrieve them for you. I'm reluctant to attempt another synchronizing, as this will mean another 24+ hours wait for some users.
Again, I'm sorry for the confusion, but hey! We got a brand new server.