Forum maintenance on 2016-05-23

I am scheduling a prolonged forum maintenance session for Monday, 2016-05-23, starting from 7 PM GMT. Maintenance may take several hours, so be prepared for the case that the forum will be unavailable until the next day.

There are two major reasons for this longer maintenance:

  • I am planning to move from the beta branch to the stable branch of Discourse, the software that this forum runs on. This means that there will be less frequent updates with the advantage that fewer things will suddenly break.
  • The current forum (transactional) mail provider, Mandrill, will soon be absorbed into MailChimp and will lose it’s free plan! This means that I will transition to an alternative transactional mail provider, for example SparkPost.

There issue with the mail provider became urgent, so I addressed that issue today. While I was at it, I also switched Discourse to the stable branch, so that fewer updates will be made. So, the need for the scheduled maintenance seems to be gone.

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