To get the details on both the Upgrade and the Downtime, read on…
First, I’ll explain the cause of the downtime: An ongoing and nagging bug has plagued our mail server since MaxUnderground went online. Earlier this week, the cause of the problems was figured out, but a typo in the configuration caused MU to go offline for about 24 hours. Then, after that bug was fixed, the site software was successfully upgraded. I decided to really push the site to see if anything would break. As luck would have it, I successfully pushed too hard and broke the site. In the process I corrupted our database and it took two days to get all the data back online. I apologize if this inconvenienced anyone.
Anyway, the upgrade is complete and I believe our email bugs are now history. Those of you that have registered as members but never received your password will be getting an email with the password, hopefully, this week some time.
In summary, the external changes to the site are as follows:
- The site has a cleaner look
- An index has been added at the bottom of the news page for getting to old news items
- Slashdot style news commentaries have been added
- community moderation has been implemented in the news commentaries
- several internal and administrative changes were also made
News Commentaries work like this: On the news page, click on a headline to get to a News:Details page. From there, click “Add Comment” to add a comment to the news item. MU will randomly choose logged in members to moderate these comments. Moderators rate comments by choosing words to describe them. Rating an item affects its “Score.” Comments with scores less than 1 will be hidden from view. At most, a member will moderate once a day.
The idea is that insightful and interesting comments will become highlighted with high scores, while spam will be moderated out.
