SystemNewsArchive

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

2006

• 2006-12-01 0445h - 0830h System unavailable due to network failure.
• 2006-11-24 0613h - 0827h System down due to a power outage.
• 2006-11-20 "favourite" icon was not showing up properly. Now fixed.
• 2006-11-18 0815h - 0930h System down due to a power outage.
• 2006-11-05 1400h - 1430h System outages to install security patches
• 2006-11-02 0030h - 0825h System down due to a power outage. The server has been reconfigured to come up automatically after a power outage.
• 2006-11-01 0600h - 1000h System down due to a power outage.
• 2006-10-01 Move the server from Aliant to LandlordIT, to a much faster multi-homed connection for much better performance.
• 2006-07-29 0700h - 1000h Scheduled power maintenance in the building the server's housed in.
• 2006-06-23 During some system updates, accidentally removed the anti-spam module. About 78 pages damaged and restored.
• 2006-06-13 Move entire system to new, much faster server. The old server is locked; traffic will gradually move over to new one.
• 2006-06-06 Day Of The Beast - move pictures from bonmot.ca to gay.hfxns.org
• 2006-06-01 New design in place! Enjoy!
• 2006-05-27 0600h - 0845h server filesystem filled up, server was refusing connections. Sorry for any inconvenience.
• 2006-05-24 Adjust VirtualHost configuration to make the site more portable
• 2006-05-23 Preparing for switch to new design on 1st of June. To test the new design, visit WikiNextDesign
• 2006-05-18 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
• 2006-05-11 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.
• 2006-05-05 The search function has been optimized. Searches are now much quicker. Thanks for your patience.
• 2006-04-25 We experienced the first attack of wiki spam that the system has ever had; install BannedContent page to control it.
• 2006-03-29 Change the configuration slightly to make the Username: box on the edit screen save your username.
• 2006-03 Switch LocalEvents over to a calendar system where each day has its own page
• 2006-02-11 Move the entire site to new software [Oddmuse]

2005

• 2005-10-06 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.
• 2005-04-08 System was down between 0900h and 1430h for an operating system cluster patch
• 2005-04-05 morning: system was down for a couple hours for a software upgrade to Apache 1.3.33
• 2005-04-03: Deleted about fifty pages that had been MarkedForDeletion for more than 6 months

2004

• 2004-12-22: 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 AnonymousPerson?01 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 days. 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.