Tenths down time - 2nd-4th of December

[EvilPumpkin]

Hi folks,

The long awaiting upgrade will be happening this weekend. However, due to the extremely large size of the database, it's going to involve some significant downtime.

The site will be unavailable from approximately 22:00GMT on Thursday 2nd of December to 22:00GMT on Saturday 4th of December.

Note: this has changed from the original scheduled time in order to accommodate the last championship round of the V8s.

During this period, Tenths will not be available. A holder page will be in place informing visitors of this.

It is possible that the upgrade will take less time than this, so you can pop back from time to time to see if we're back up earlier than scheduled! If we encounter any problems, we'll update the holder page with any new information.

Our Chat Moderators have asked us to remind you that the upgrade does not affect the chat room, so if you really need to get that motorsport chatting "fix" you can still do so! If you are new to the chat, please take the time to visit the Chat Site for information on how to access, rules of chat, etc.

We thought you might have some questions and we've tried to answer as much as possible below. If you have any other questions relating to the upgrade, please post them to this thread and we'll do our best to answer them.

Why do we need an upgrade?
Technology moves onwards and so does software. The software that Tenths runs on has reached the end of its life for a number of reasons.

• Product enhancements are no longer being produced for this version
• Any known "bugs" and security issues with this version are fixed in the new version. It's no longer really possible to "patch" this version.
• It is becoming increasingly difficult to get support for this version.

For all of these reasons, it was decided that we would need to do the upgrade if we wanted Tenths to continue to grow and thrive. We're not just upgrading for the sake of it - this needs to be done.

Why is it going to take so long?
The reason for the long outage is that we have well over a million posts to recompile!

It didn't take this long the last time changes were made!
No, but we did encounter a lot of problems. We do try to learn from our mistakes!

Whilst it is technically possible to keep the site running while the recompile is ongoing, it would be extremely slow and subject to timeouts. It would also extend the time it takes to complete the process. After much discussion, we've decided it's better to take the site down for this period than have a partially functional site which would cause frustration, double posts and much hair tearing!


Why now?
December is the quietest time of the year for Tenths. Weekends are the quietest time of the week. We narrowed it down to 3 weekends in December. We've decided to do it this weekend because that gives us 3 weeks until Christmas in order to "bed" the system in and address any problems we may encounter. We're sure you appreciate that none of us want to spend our Christmas break fixing software problems!We also believe that those of you who are going to have time off for the holidays would prefer a nice fully-functional Tenths for when you've had enough of crackers and turkey!

Are you expecting problems?
No....and yes! We've had the new software on test for 5 weeks now and have modified the system to meet our requirements. However, the real test is always going to be how the software performs with real traffic. We're hoping that we're not going to have any problems, but we have to be realistic and expect that there may be some.