Friday Update

[Steve Pavlina]

I plan to officially announce the forums on the blog this evening (evening based on GMT-8). I want to announce it going into the weekend because site traffic is lower on Sat and Sun, so the audience will ramp up more gradually than it would if I announced it Monday. Even so, I imagine the sign-ups will come in quickly.

We don't need to have everything perfect for the launch, since Erin and I will make ourselves very available throughout the next week, and plenty of tweaks can be done after the launch. Many tweaks have been made in the last couple days.

Although each moderator is assigned to a single forum, all of them have "super moderator" access, meaning that any moderator can effectively moderate any forum. Most of the moderators have previous moderation experience, some of them extensively, so the forums will be managed mostly by veteran moderators with decades of combined experience.

Because the site behind these forums already gets so much traffic, I can't predict how much the forums will stress the web server once members begin pouring in. If by chance the server gets overloaded, I'll have to take the forums offline temporarily, upgrade the server as needed, and reopen the forums. Depending on the type of upgrade neeeded (if any), that might take a few hours or a few days. I'll let everyone know about this risk when I announce the forums in the blog, so hopefully people will understand if some downtime is needed for an upgrade. The blog traffic grew gradually enough that I could anticipate when upgrades were needed, but this forum launch is a unique situation.

If the server gets overloaded and I need to upgrade, no data should be lost, so when the forums come back online, we'll be able to continue where we left off.

If after the forum launch you can't access the site, or if you see a message saying the forums are closed for maintenance, then you'll know I'm busy working on the upgrade. If this happens I'll use the blog to post progress updates if it's going to take more than a day.

Hopefully the launch will go smoothly and the current server will be able to handle the load, but there's no way to know until we launch.