Returning to use Poniverse's Twitter account (or some other medium) to inform users on site status

[Luna the Great of all the Russias 2,981]

The site has returned from been down for a few days due to maintenance. It appears that the Poniverse Twitter account was previously used to announce site downtimes. Unless I am simply unaware of it, it would be good to have some means to briefly announce to users, at least for more prolonged outages, that the staff anticipates or acknowledges an outage, and, if possible, to give an estimated time for when the site is expected to return to being operational. It appears there have been concerns and confusion among users.

[Tacodidra 61,065]

I agree and think it would also be nice to see an update on the Poniverse Facebook (that exists too, though it's inactive). Just because Twitter/X is pretty much useless without an account.

[Rafa Stary Mini 2,872]

They at least use their discord to announce these, it's free to enter

[Starlight Serenade 3,010]

Likewise, I just found out about the discord server and joined there to find out about the announcement. What if people don't have a discord and/or other social media as well?

Edited March 23 by StarlightSerenade

[GeneralDirection 1,042]

Poniverse does have a service that was used in the past for site status updates here. In the future, it would be nice to see it (or something similar) being used again as not everyone has or wants a Discord account. It also used to be mentioned on here when forum upgrades were being done, which would also be nice to know.

[Flew Away 932]

@GeneralDirection What really happened to Poniverse.net? Yes it would be nice to know what's going on for "normal" users. Most users just couldn't get any information. The X account is nearly dead without updates.

[North Star 5,218]

4 hours ago, Rafa Stary said:

They at least use their discord to announce these, it's free to enter

totally forgot about that  jumped on to poniverse ajacent discords to find out what was happening, but never thought to check there for some reason 

[Flew Away 932]

"something" happened to pony.fm. Seems that a backup copy was up after the site was back. Lost some of the latest uploads. So just re-uploaded again. Problem is when you embed on other places. Then it gets lost there.

[Mirage 24,747]

It would be nice to see updates on X, since it's easy to find if you search for it.

https://twitter.com/mlpforums

I was banned from the Discord server. 

10 hours ago, Props Valroa said:

It would be good if there was some transparency in site updates instead of it happening all of a sudden without any prior warning. If there was some sort of update log that could be posted publicly for what exactly is being updated / changed, to be posted in the Throne Room - I think that would be rather helpful as well. 

It's possible to use the Announcement feature of this forum engine that appears at the top of the page ( or in the sidebar) - that way you can't miss it. 

7 hours ago, GeneralDirection said:

Poniverse does have a service that was used in the past for site status updates here. In the future, it would be nice to see it (or something similar) being used again as not everyone has or wants a Discord account. It also used to be mentioned on here when forum upgrades were being done, which would also be nice to know.

It appears that hasn't been updated either. :/

Edited March 24 by Mirage

[ZiggWheelsManning 9,922]

13 minutes ago, Mirage said:

I was banned from the Discord server. 

That's sad  What happened?  

[Mirage 24,747]

4 minutes ago, ZiggWheelsManning said:

That's sad  What happened?  

I can't discuss it here. 

I'll get banned!

[Flew Away 932]

12 hours ago, North Star said:

totally forgot about that  jumped on to poniverse ajacent discords to find out what was happening, but never thought to check there for some reason 

Discord is just like it's name. A badass app that is completely locked out on my work from any network. I have to use my phone if I want to access it. Mayby that says something about the trust they put in it *lol*. Must be way better ways to communicate.

[Ice Princess Silky <3 13,501]

Hello there, lovelies! Thank you so much for your feedback!

Normally a Twitter post would have been automatically made via the status.io page, but with all of the login systems down, there was simply no way for us to get into it <3 
This has been the first time in a while that everything had been down at once without any pre-planning for it prior. All of us have been insanely busy. Luckily, our tech ponies still ensure to find a way that things keep running <3 

Sorry for the delay in my response here. As I've said, we've been insanely busy <3 but not without caring at all <3 

[Mirage 24,747]

A server apocalypse. I like it. 

Buffy did it. We all know it.

[Rikifive 24,125]

On 2024-03-23 at 4:01 PM, Props Valroa said:

It would be good if there was some transparency in site updates instead of it happening all of a sudden without any prior warning. If there was some sort of update log that could be posted publicly for what exactly is being updated / changed, to be posted in the Throne Room - I think that would be rather helpful as well. 

 

On 2024-03-24 at 2:01 AM, Mirage said:

It's possible to use the Announcement feature of this forum engine that appears at the top of the page ( or in the sidebar) - that way you can't miss it. 

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.

Edited March 27 by Rikifive

[Luna the Great of all the Russias 2,981]

1 hour ago, Rikifive said:

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.

I am not sure how it functions on the staff side, but at least while there are no automated systems in place, to make such updates manually. So, however it is to be determined, multiple staff members would be trusted with access to Poniverse or some MLPF affiliated Twitter (or some other off-site) account; at least one of them are bound to notice soon enough that the site is down. Because these posts would be made manually, perhaps they would make statuses on more extended outages (not for ones lasting short amounts of time as that may be tedious, and the situation may be resolved by the time a status is made).

[Rikifive 24,125]

1 hour ago, Props Valroa said:

@Rikifive

Even if it is minor things, I think it is important that the staff be transparent and open about what they are working on as it effects everyone on the forums, and sudden outages happening without any prior warning  is probably confusing to users who aren't in the know about it. At the very least it would be nice to see some sort of changelog in the throne room so we can keep track of said updates, even if they are minimal, at a public level.

If you're interested in changelog, you can view it here, and it's always available under that link. We were on 4.7.13 prior to the update, so everything past that is "new". That said, it's not really about what mlpf staff is working on, it's about whatever Invision does. None of the changes are strictly related to our needs (usually these are against our needs tbh lol). Most of the changes are either unrelated to users (some admin/tech stuff) or are just optimizations to things no one here ever had problems with. Take a look yourself and tell me if this is interesting and something members should know. 

But announcing we're updating with some brief relevant information is something that definitely should be a thing. This also would serve as a topic, where users would be able to report new problems for us to keep track of, and where we could list various things to keep everyone updated. Next time we'll try to organize it all better, because such topic/announcement is something I'd like to have myself.

 

Aside software updates; When we make some changes ourselves, we usually notify members what gets changed. By an occasion, are you interested even in small things like this?

https://mlpforums.com/topic/199930-tweaks-bugfixes-mobile-view-and-achievements/

If so, at least I, will be happy to be open about everything I change or modify.

And like I said earlier, it's hard to place a prior warning to sudden, unexpected outages heh. The long outage wasn't strictly related to the update, it happened some time after the forums were updated successfully. No one saw that coming. It's not forums that broke, there was another technical difficulty that put the entire poniverse down.

2 hours ago, Luna the Great of all the Russias said:

I am not sure how it functions on the staff side, but at least while there are no automated systems in place, to make such updates manually. So, however it is to be determined, multiple staff members would be trusted with access to Poniverse or some MLPF affiliated Twitter (or some other off-site) account; at least one of them are bound to notice soon enough that the site is down. Because these posts would be made manually, perhaps they would make statuses on more extended outages (not for ones lasting short amounts of time as that may be tedious, and the situation may be resolved by the time a status is made).

I completely agree. I don't have access to any of that personally though.

[Rikifive 24,125]

1 minute ago, Props Valroa said:

@Rikifive

Still though, a link to that changelog could be posted to a topic in the throne room, which is what I am proposing here. You can have a topic in the throne room so all users can see what is being worked on, report issues, and discuss the changes in a centralized and dedicated location as well as plans for future upgrades / proposals for the site's layout.

Fair enough, next time everything will be posted properly, with the entire changelog dumped in a spoiler for those interested.  

It's how it should be, after all, in my opinion.