Maintenance window in a few hours

[denise]

After yesterday's unexpected outage, we'll need some time to finish the cleanup and get the site back to running in normal (paired database) mode. It's technically possible to do this with the site still up, mark assures me, but it's more futureproof to do it while the site's in maintenance mode. So, we're going to do that tonight.

The maintenance window will begin tonight at midnight EST/9PM PST/5AM UTC. (See this in your timezone.) We're tentatively allocating 2 hours for the work; it may be longer or shorter depending on what we find when we dig into it.

We're going to try doing this with the site in "read-only" mode, where you can read existing entries and comments but not make new ones, rather than maintenance mode, where the entire site is unavailable with a "down for maintenance" splash page replacing all pages. It may prove impossible, though, so if the site switches from read-only mode to down-for-maintenance mode, don't be surprised.

Watch our offsite status for updates -- we'll keep you posted there as things develop.

EDIT: Complete!

[denise]

The site will be going down for maintenance in about ten minutes (at the time I'm writing this). Again, we're going to try for read-only mode rather than "maintenance mode", but that might not be possible.

We'll keep you updated if it looks like we're going to run long, but we're hoping to complete this in 2 hours or less. Watch the offsite status Twitter account for updates.

EDIT: And, we're back! Just goes to show, when mark estimates an hour and you schedule 2 hours just to be safe, everything will finish much faster than that.

We've noticed a few instances of icons not loading, and are looking into it.