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I will be uploading some code changes later. These include:

- avatar-related stuff to support the new membership model
- minor presentation tweaks

The latter is actually quite major, in terms of what changes underneath. Because of limitations in the board templating system, virtually all of the forum template files need to be swapped out. (In contrast, a single edit took care of the homepage and the entire photo database.)

I expect to begin the work about two hours after the time of this post. It should take around half an hour to complete. The site should continue to work throughout, but may briefly look hideous. As always, if you're writing a longer post or PM, save a copy before submitting.

Beginning the nasty part of this now.

With a site of this magnitude, do you have a staging server (or 2) before going to official publish server? I dread not having one on some sites I work on.

Coz wrote:With a site of this magnitude, do you have a staging server (or 2) before going to official publish server? I dread not having one on some sites I work on.

We have a testing environment, but naturally, that's not 100% identical to our server environment here, so a certain risk always remains.

Adding a dedicated test server would be most useful, but right now, I'm afraid the site revenue does not nearly allow it.

Still, if an update would go utterly wrong, the worst case is that we have to re-install a recent backup, resulting in a certain downtime. So we do have fall-back solutions in these cases (and they seemed to work when we had to use them during the server transition).

The worst of this is behind us. One small problem remains with the one-off script to set avatars to the the new defaults; I'm working on that at the moment.

Finally done, and fixed some layout horkage that escaped the first time around.

You may notice a little slowness for the next few hours; some database queries are cached for performance reasons, and the cache had to be emptied to make some of this take.