Comments on: Software updates… update

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:36:05 +0000

I’d like to be notified by email before any involuntary change. Perhaps you can add a checkbox in the member area for this? And yes, I still have an active site on freebsd6. As long as the site is working I have no reason to voluntarily change realms or look in the member area or blog.

By: CasaDeRobison

CasaDeRobison — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 18:42:54 +0000

Just an idea mostly unrelated to the actual content of the post. You mention “retiring yellow for a while” which I assume is to prevent “mindshare” clashes between people using an old yellow and a new yellow (if that makes sense). Perhaps “namespace” the colors with a year (so you could have yellow2014, yellow2015, etc) so as to ever avoid confusion between which yellow someone might be using (though you’re likely doing that by not recycling colors until no one is using the old color anymore).

In any case, you’ve probably thought this through far more than I have, just an idea that came to mind.

By: jdw

jdw — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 22:48:00 +0000

In reply to Zack. I suspect a lot of the pre-rainbow sites are in that category. And yes, we're considering an option that would let you choose how aggressively you want us to upgrade a particular site. -jdw

By: Zack

Zack — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 22:35:18 +0000

I had one of those pre-rainbow sites. The thing is, it’s a bunch of static files that are rarely updated via rsync. As such, the realm it runs under is (from my perspective, anyway) vanishingly unlikely to be relevant. Would it make your life easier if we could mark sites like this “I don’t care what realm this uses”?

By: jdw

jdw — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 17:15:05 +0000

In reply to Patrick Burroughs (Celti). Enabling zlib.output_compression by default is new with 5.5 but not new to 5.5. In other words, it's been that way for awhile now. Be sure to file a bug with the makers of the software you're using if it didn't automatically detect that. -jdw

By: Patrick Burroughs (Celti)

Patrick Burroughs (Celti) — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 16:44:20 +0000

Does the PHP 5.5 configuration enable zlib.output_compression by default now? I just had to disable that in my conf/php.ini after switching to the 5.5 server type due to a conflict with the software I’m using.

By: Tim McCormack

Tim McCormack — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 12:30:03 +0000

Thanks, I really appreciate your commitment to stability and transparency! I just bit the bullet and migrated all my sites to green realm and latest server types. The only thing I had to do was remove a php_flag disabling magic quotes in an .htaccess (because apparently newer PHP doesn't even have that misfeature!) For anyone who still needs php_value/php_flag, I found a migration path in the forum.

By: Pj

Pj — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 06:27:03 +0000

Sending out some emails might be a good idea if you want to get people to upgrade to newer realms. After you told me in the forum that one of my sites was on an old realm, I switched it to the latest one. The only reason it was still on the old one was that I had no idea I should ever bother to change it. I was barely aware that I even had choices. I chose one when switching the site to stochastic billing and never thought about it again.

Something in the member interface would be good too, but I can imagine a lot of your members may not log in all that often, and so without an email they may not get adequate notice of the forced upgrade.

Even in the worst case, relatively few people will be affected. We’re hesitant to send out messages about things that might happen that for most people, won’t. Over the years our members have expressed a pretty firm preference for us to email them less, rather than more. If we find particular trouble spots and a way to detect them so that we could selectively email just the affected people, we would definitely consider that. -jdw