Howdy Folks, I was wondering how everyone schedules their site's down time? Do you just pull your forum offline whenever you have time to do the work (upgrade, major permissions change, etc) or do you schedule and let the members know? For my part, I try and schedule upgrades and major changes. The topic of my forum is DJs and most of my guys come home from a gig 1 or 2 AM so doing it in the middle of the night, isn't the best idea but it'd be great for me as I'm a night owl. Plus with time zones and all my west coasters are just coming on as my east coasters are packing it in for the night. I find my sweet spot is about 9am on a Monday/Tuesday morning most people are either still sleeping or at their day jobs so it's pretty quiet, I turn the board off then go about my business. Unless it's a major security patch, I'll wait until Monday morning to do my thing.. How about you? -Dan
I perform all scheduled maintenance and/or upgrades every Sunday at 10:00 PM (EST) - at that time, there are (quite literally) no members logged in.
If there aren't any or many members online when I'm ready, I'll just go ahead and do it. Otherwise I will make an announcement that we will be temporarily be going offline for a very short time about an hour after the announcement is made.
Typically, I'll just perform updates whenever I have the time. Most are relatively quick and easy to perform. For security patches, I usually don't even turn the forum offline, as it's usually just two or three files.
If whatever I'm doing doesn't require the board to be closed, I'll just do it on-the-spot whenever I'm ready.
Rarely do I ever need to close the board. When I do it is just a vBulletin upgrade, and sometimes even that won't require me to close the board. I'll do it whenever, preferably when there are less people online.
I don't usually like to close the board for an upgrade, but I just don't want to take a chance of screwing the database up.
Usually I send out an email to all of my members one week ahead. Then I go through and move the files and accounts to the new server. I can't accommodate everyone, so I just have to choose the time that works best for the datacenter. This is because I have many Asian users as well as my main demographic of users in the US. I always set MyBB to maintenance mode one hour ahead, so that no posts are lost during the transfer.
I only turn the board offline for MyBB updates that require the upgrade script, which are typically bug fix releases. I don't like turning it offline, either, because doing so also screws up most of the main website, but I do it to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. Better to turn off the board for a few minutes to do an update than not turn the board off and have spend hours to fix some disastrous problem later.
I wouldn't go so far as to send an e-mail; it just attracts users to your website only to see that it's closed. :p I'd put a notice up on the site so that those who do visit your site are aware - but those who don't visit shouldn't be bothered with it. Just my :2cents:
I schedule downtime when it is convenient for me to work on the site. Usually that means before noon California time. If the site is going to be down for a couple of hours, then I post about it a couple of days in advance. If it's just going to be down for 10 minutes or so, then I post about it an hour or so in advance.
I make an announcement in the Announcements forum with what changes the site will undergo, the time, the date and when the updates should be completed. I usually schedule for early morning - 7-9 AM; That's the slow time...
I do post an announcement about the downtime and perform it mostly very early in the morning when nobody is on the board.
If the forum is completly dead when I need to do then i just do it if it doesn't take to long time. Else I write an announcement to let my members know that its going to happen.
