The Forum has been through some pretty serious updates recently, most of which are boring (and at the bottom of this post) but there are a few things of note.
We’re finally off the Discourse Beta train!
As early adopters, we’ve been running the beta this whole time! While the issues have been pretty few and far between, it’s definitely not always been smooth sailing. It’s also led to a lot more maintenance windows (to the extent I really haven’t bothered to schedule or announce them).
Additional sign-in options
You can now sign into Discourse with your Google/Microsoft account. If the email address matches, it should log you straight in, but if you encounter any problems feel free to PM me.
Additional notification options.
In addition to the super customizable email options detailed here, we’ve added a Telegram bot that will notify you of new threads. This is added primarily for the folks who aren’t active in our Slack community but want the real-time forum notifications, but use it however you want.
Actual scheduled maintenance!
Now that we’re off the beta train, maintenance will hit a level it’s actually reasonable to schedule in advance. For now, to get them go watch this thread. I may ultimately end up doing something more robust but that’ll do for now.
Boring Technical details
The forum has run so long on the same VM we had to finally update our version of Ubuntu from 14.04 up to 18.04 due to 14.04 having reached end of life. We had partially upgraded to 16.04 but things just needed some TLC so it made sense to go all the way to 18.04 during the stabilization. As things have otherwise been humming along with the current setup, not much else has really been done.