Forums upgrades coming April and May 2017

[Chris Hennes]

This discussion serves as a heads-up and status update for a series of upgrades and server migrations that will be occurring over the next two months. If you are interested in such things you may wish to subscribe to the topic. We don't expect any individual modification to result in significant downtime, but you may notice a few short outages as these things are applied. 

 

The first will be a minor patch to our Invision Community Suite software this Friday, April 14th at 11pm CDT, followed immediately by an upgrade from PHP 5 to PHP 7. While normally these tiny point upgrades only result in 2-3 minutes of site downtime, and the upgrade to PHP 7 is supposed to be seamless, we plan on the site being offline for an hour or so while we make sure all of our custom software is behaving properly.

 

Once I've got firm dates and times from our host for the next set of upgrade (a data center migration) I'll post to this discussion.

[Chris Hennes]

Update 4/15/2017

The first round of updates (primarily an upgrade to PHP 7) is now complete. If you see any strange behavior, please report it here.

[Chris Hennes]

Update 5/4/2017

Invision has issued a patch to the Forums' software -- I will be applying it tomorrow (Friday) night at 11pm CDT. I expect about five minutes of downtime for the upgrade.

[Chris Hennes]

Update 5/7/2017

The next migration window from our host is this evening from 9pm to midnight CDT. I expect the forums to be offline (or in a read-only state) for about ten minutes at some point during that window while our database is transferred to a new data center.