SystemNewsArchive

Current and recent events can be found at the bottom of FrontPage.

2011

• There were no outages in 2011

2010

• March 24, 2010 09:00 - 11:00: System unavailable after accidental power outage
• April 1, 2010 09:00 - 10:00: System unavailable during patching
• April 1, 2010 16:15 - 17:15: System unavailable during nove to new ISP, AirFire
• August 23, 2010 10:00 - 11:00: System moved from 15-year-old Sun E220R to an AMD 3800 X2 with approximately 15x the performance and 1/5 the power consumption.
• September 24, 2010 11:00 - 13:00: System down during maintenance time

2009

• April 7, 2009 17:00 - 20:00 System down to move off a failing hard disk (users will notice VASTLY improved performance)
• April 23, 2009 14:20 - 14:25 System down to move back to the internal hard disks
• October 9, 2009 10:30 - 13:30: System unavailable while being moved to a new machine room.

2008

• March 9, 2008 10:00 - 2107h System unavailable during power outage
• March 29, 2008 06:00 - 06:40 System unavailable during power outage
• May 20, 2008 10:00 - 11:00 System unavailable during power outage
• June 11, 2008 11:00: Format of dates in LocalEvents changed to be more humanly readable
• September 3, 2008 00:00: Cleanup some pages MarkedForDeletion
• November 30, 2008 all day : system will be unavailable due to power outages.
• December 4, 2008 14:00 - 14:15 System down during move to new office space.
• December 7, 2008 12:00 - 13:00 System down for OS patching

2007

• January 31, 2007 0730h - 1030h System unavailable for periods for upgrades
• February 9, 2007 1900h - 2100h System unavailable during upgrades
• April 11, 2007 0100h - 0115h System unavailable during network upgrade
• April 19, 2007 2200h (approx) short outage during network upgrade
• July 6, 2007 0051h - 0726h network outage

2006

• December 1, 2006 0445h - 0830h System unavailable due to network failure.
• November 24, 2006 0613h - 0827h System down due to a power outage.
• November 20, 2006 "favourite" icon was not showing up properly. Now fixed.
• November 18, 2006 0815h - 0930h System down due to a power outage.
• November 5, 2006 1400h - 1430h System outages to install security patches
• November 2, 2006 0030h - 0825h System down due to a power outage. The server has been reconfigured to come up automatically after a power outage.
• November 1, 2006 0600h - 1000h System down due to a power outage.
• October 1, 2006 Move the server from Aliant to LandlordIT, to a much faster multi-homed connection for much better performance.
• July 29, 2006 0700h - 1000h Scheduled power maintenance in the building the server's housed in.
• June 23, 2006 During some system updates, accidentally removed the anti-spam module. About 78 pages damaged and restored.
• June 13, 2006 Move entire system to new, much faster server. The old server is locked; traffic will gradually move over to new one.
• June 6, 2006 Day Of The Beast - move pictures from bonmot.ca to gay.hfxns.org
• June 1, 2006 New design in place! Enjoy!
• May 27, 2006 0600h - 0845h server filesystem filled up, server was refusing connections. Sorry for any inconvenience.
• May 24, 2006 Adjust VirtualHost configuration to make the site more portable
• May 23, 2006 Preparing for switch to new design on 1st of June. To test the new design, visit WikiNextDesign
• May 18, 2006 Changed the style slightly so that pictures now look like Polaroids® a bit. Also, fixed the photo captions so they don't extend beyond the left and right of the photos. And, made it correctly recognize photos where the extensions (JPG, PNG etc.) were in all-caps. Thanks to CSS god DasSheep
• May 11, 2006 QuestionAsker? "captcha" style security has been enabled instead of BannedContent style. Every time you save a page you must answer the "captcha" question at the top of the page.
• May 5, 2006 The search function has been optimized. Searches are now much quicker. Thanks for your patience.
• April 25, 2006 We experienced the first attack of wiki spam that the system has ever had; install BannedContent page to control it.
• March 29, 2006 Change the configuration slightly to make the Username: box on the edit screen save your username.
• March, 2006 Switch LocalEvents over to a calendar system where each day has its own page
• February 11, 2006 Move the entire site to new software Oddmuse

2005

• October 6, 2005 A locking problem was found in the database which caused page save function to fail. The symptom was that the page name would be listed as a non-created link (with a question mark after it) after a save. Rebuilding the database fixed it.
• April 8, 2005 System was down between 0900h and 1430h for an operating system cluster patch
• April 5, 2005 morning: system was down for a couple hours for a software upgrade to Apache 1.3.33
• April 3, 2005: Deleted about fifty pages that had been MarkedForDeletion for more than 6 months

2004

• December 22, 2004: Snipped several hundred spam URLs put up by gghggh.com out of Beijing. -mg
• Sep 30th: 0920h - power outage downtown has taken http://gay.hfxns.org/ offline altogether. Should be back in early afternoon.
• Sep 30th: gay.hfxns.org not saving pages from Safari, possibly other browsers. We're working on it.
• Sep 27th: system unavailable from noon to 2230h
• Sep 14: Remove AssumptionsCampaign poster - campaign is done.
• September 13: new domain online! This 'pedia is also available at http://gay.hfxns.org/
• September 10: system moved back to goodies.yi.org. Thanks MikeGodfrey!!
• August 27th system moved temporarily to bonmot.ca
• August 25th System shut down due to threats of legal action from moderator of InternationalDragQueensAndFriends
• August 23rd EmeraldGibson erases herself from the encyclopedia
• July 27th New banner! Thanks JoeHalifaxGuy!!
• Jun 29th Add posters for AssumptionsCampaign to FrontPage. This campaign will run for a couple of months.
• Jun 4th: commercial ad system has been up for 12 hours and has made one penny US$ which will go towards the system's hard disk, bandwidth and backups. Go banner ads!!
• Jun 3rd: commercial ads at the bottom of each page. We get a sliver of money every time someone clicks on a link. More info is available on BannerAds
• May 19th: Save function on Edit Page screen accidentally disabled. Sorry about that!
• May 16th: text after the first image on a page turns into a caption for that.
• May 14th: the first image on a page will have text (and other pics) flowed around it.
• May 13th: for images that are on the beginning of the line, the following text now wraps around it.
• May 7th: When you're editing a page, the FindPage link pops open a new window for you.
• Mar 16th: HitCounter is now faster, displays 7-day stats, and shows hits per day instead of total hits for all columns. Will show 30-day stats when we have collected 'em.
• Mar 11th: RecentChanges newest items are at beginning of line; only a certain amount of changes are kept for frequently-changing pages.
• Mar 10th: RecentChanges is protected. Days scroll off after 8 days (is this too little?)
• Mar 7th: System reboot 1510h - 1520h. System had been up for over two months. Apologies for any inconvenience.
• Mar 7th: Fixed SixSingleQuotes.
• Mar 5th: System outage 0530h - 0900h. Apologies for any inconvenience.
• Mar 3rd: "Comments" field added to "Edit" page. Comments left here show up on RecentChanges, so you can tell people what change(s) you made to a page.
• Mar 2nd: "Edit" link at the bottom of the page changed to a button so that webcrawlers do not try to edit every page on the system.
• Mar 2nd: Garbage Page Deletion numerous pages of complete nonsense are being deleted from the database, making the total page count decrease. These include fragments of ideas, the Christmas song game, and pages which are totally irrelevant to gay life in Halifax, with no information (or opinion) comment. Once this initial pass is done, pages which should be deleted will be MarkedForDeletion.
• Mar 1st: formatting functions repaired, specifically Definition Lists. See TextFormattingRules for the full list.
• Mar 1st: context display for FindPage results much better.
• Mar 1st: title of page now has "Gay Halifax" and spaces in it. Same words are emitted as meta keywords. The purpose of both changes is to make the web crawlers index the pages better.
• Mar 1st: "Main Page" link added at the top of the page for people who get dropped into the system from search engines.
• Mar 1st: Ask Jeeves/Teoma.com web crawler was using precious resources on the system and skewing the HitCounter count for FindPage. Added an access list so it can't do Search and Edit functions.
• Mar 1st: program file was converted to "unix" file format from "dos" format & interpreter taken out of "Warn" mode. Will make for much smaller error logs and could possibly run quicker.
• Feb 27: search function has been provided on every page. Search function now shows the context. No weighting yet.
• Feb 27: HitCounter repaired.
• Feb 7: performance is very sluggish while we recompile the operating system. Feb 11th: performance returned to normal. Thanks for your patience
• Feb 3: saves of larger pages are failing. Not sure if it's a page size problem or a disk space problem. 7 Feb: problem with database. Now fixed! Yayyy!
• Jan 15: three-dash symbol, which should turn into <hr> is recognized in places other than the beginning of a line. 040116 fixed! yayyy!
• Jan 15: things that look like internal links, in external links, break horrifically. 040116 fixed! yayyy!
• Jan 8: ordered and unordered lists with external links do not format properly. 9 Jan: fixed! yayyyy!
• Jan 5: BumpyText not recognized in paragraphs with external links. 8 Jan: fixed! yayyy!
• Jan 5: HitCounter is broken. Sorry! Will work on it when we have time. Feb 26th: fixed!! Yayyy! (rather craftily)
• Jan 2: Searches are currently case-sensitive. 5 Jan 04: Fixed! Yayyy!

2003

• Dec: Major database problems. Much code rewritten, formatting coding changes.