SystemNewsArchive

Major policy and system changes can be found at AboutThisSystem

2022

April 3, 2022 10:10 - 13:08
System down while diagnosing a connectivity issue, that is, fail2ban banned mercury's own IP number while downloading JaneKansas' Harper Lee website. And then, later another 15 minutes while the service provider replaced the motherboard due to rx_csum_offload_errors (which didn't fix it.)

2021

July 10, 2021
System down for a couple minutes a few times to perform Debian system upgrades

2020

January, 2020
System moved from Debian 7.11 to Debian 9.11
March 12, 2020
Server moved to a kimsufi KS-1 server, an Atom D425 - 2GB DDR3 1066 MHz - 500GB SATA at the RBX5 data centre in Roubaix, France.

2014

May, 2014
System was again physically moved with now downtime

2013

June, 2013
System was physically moved to a new machine room but with no downtime.

2011

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
Another wiki spam attack; 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
September 30, 2004
0920h - power outage downtown has taken https://gay.hfxns.org/ offline altogether. Should be back in early afternoon.
gay.hfxns.org not saving pages from Safari, possibly other browsers. We're working on it.
September 27, 2004
system unavailable from noon to 2230h
September 14, 2004
Remove AssumptionsCampaign poster - campaign is done.
September 13, 2004
new domain online! This 'pedia is also available at https://gay.hfxns.org/
September 10, 2004
system moved back to goodies.yi.org. Thanks MikeGodfrey!!
August 27, 2004
system moved temporarily to bonmot.ca
August 25, 2004
System shut down due to threats of legal action from moderator of InternationalDragQueensAndFriends
August 23, 2004
EmeraldGibson erases herself from the encyclopedia
July 27, 2004
New banner! Thanks JoeHalifaxGuy!!
June 29, 2004
Add posters for AssumptionsCampaign to FrontPage. This campaign will run for a couple of months.
June 4, 2004
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!!
June 3, 2004
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 19, 2004
Save function on Edit Page screen accidentally disabled. Sorry about that!
May 16, 2004
text after the first image on a page turns into a caption for that.
May 14, 2004
the first image on a page will have text (and other pics) flowed around it.
May 13, 2004
for images that are on the beginning of the line, the following text now wraps around it.
May 7, 2004
When you're editing a page, the FindPage link pops open a new window for you.
March 16, 2004
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.
March 11, 2004
RecentChanges newest items are at beginning of line; only a certain amount of changes are kept for frequently-changing pages.
March 10, 2004
RecentChanges is protected. Days scroll off after 8 days (is this too little?)
March 7, 2004
System reboot 1510h - 1520h. System had been up for over two months. Apologies for any inconvenience.
March 7, 2004
Fixed SixSingleQuotes.
March 5, 2004
System outage 0530h - 0900h. Apologies for any inconvenience.
March 3, 2004
"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.
March 2, 2004
"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.
March 2, 2004
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.
March 1, 2004
formatting functions repaired, specifically Definition Lists. See TextFormattingRules for the full list. ; March, 2004-1st: context display for FindPage results much better.
March 1, 2004
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.
"Main Page" link added at the top of the page for people who get dropped into the system from search engines.
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.
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.
February 27, 2004
search function has been provided on every page. Search function now shows the context. No weighting yet.
February 27, 2004
HitCounter repaired.
February 7, 2004
performance is very sluggish while we recompile the operating system. Feb 11th: performance returned to normal. Thanks for your patience
February 3, 2004
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!
January 15, 2004
three-dash symbol, which should turn into <hr> is recognized in places other than the beginning of a line. 040116 fixed! yayyy!
January 15, 2004
things that look like internal links, in external links, break horrifically. January 16, 2004 fixed! yayyy! ; January 8, 2004: ordered and unordered lists with external links do not format properly. 9 Jan: fixed! yayyyy!
January 5, 2004
BumpyText not recognized in paragraphs with external links. 8 Jan: fixed! yayyy!
January 5, 2004
HitCounter is broken. Sorry! Will work on it when we have time. Feb 26th: fixed!! Yayyy! (rather craftily) ; January 2, 2004: Searches are currently case-sensitive. 5 Jan 04: Fixed! Yayyy!

2003

December, 2003
Major database problems. Much code rewritten, formatting coding changes.