To be fair, the update didn't take too long and I believe the error page mentions, that an update is in progress (would have to double check it next time to be sure).
The update itself wasn't anything crazy. Usually it takes only few minutes, though this time there were some problems in the process, so it took a bit longer (it took about 25 minutes). The forums were back online and working after the update.
That was all, as far as the update goes.
Unfortunately, something else broke some time later, which was unexpected. Now that was the thing that kept not only forums, but all poniverse services down for that long.
Nevertheless, I fully agree with having relevant announcements posted. The problem was, that it wasn't easy to coordinate this action and have all relevant ponies available at one time. For example, I was stuck at work when the update took place, otherwise I'd be sure to put an announcement and a topic some time before the upgrade, to make sure no one gets yeeted out in the middle of writing a post etc.. We'll try better next time.
As for changelog, I'm the type of pony, who loves to be open about what changes are made, and I do have such logs available for my own projects (see my forum mod topic, to not search far). With forum soft updates, there's hardly any visible changes to be honest. Invision rarely releases new exciting features, lately they mostly take some down instead. It's all mostly security updates and some niche adjustments or features the end user probably won't notice. It's like Windows updates, these are frequent, take a while to install, and when you get back to your desktop afterwards, it's "spot the difference - level: impossible" challenge. Still, next time I'll try to compile a list of changes, that might be relevant to users here, and skip all that obvious security patches blah blah.
That said, I hardly see anything new with the recent update. It pretty much only broke 3rd party apps we use like RP characters. So yeah, we lost more than gained. At least there's one nice thing - they supposedly fixed the issue with status updates, that was a thing since mid-2022. Replying to statuses should no longer hang with the "saving" message, requiring a refresh to see if your comment was actually submitted. Let us know if you beg to differ on that one and still experience problems there, so I may go whining to forum software devs.
Messages on social media would be convenient as well, that's true. A shame the poniverse status page didn't notice outage either, and lies that services were up all the time.