Date: Thursday, October 23, starting at 10:00 PM
Estimated downtime: 3-4 hours

Hi guys! As most of you know, I've been working on the new layout and script upgrades for quite some time. I'm proud to announce they're almost complete, and will go live in the early hours of Friday morning.

Here are some previews of some of the improvements and changes:
Personal Messages - dokuga.com/dokuga3.JPG
Forum - dokuga.com/dokuga5.JPG
Chat - dokuga.com/dokuga8.JPG
Main Fanfiction List - dokuga.com/dokuga10.JPG
HTML Editor (no more brackets or braces!) - dokuga.com/dokuga12.JPG
Advanced Search - dokuga.com/dokuga14.JPG
Alphabetical Author Directory - dokuga.com/dokuga16.JPG
My Stories Page - dokuga.com/dokuga17.JPG

So, to get this done, Fanfiction will by shut off at 10PM Thursday night. All the story files have to be processed and converted from one encoding set to another, BBcode will be replaced by HTML, etc.,

Then, at midnight, the site will go away, new files will be uploaded, and the database will be converted. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, but I'd like to give myself a little wiggle room.

What you need to know:
1. This isn't like our last scheduled downtime when we moved to a new server. The second the upgrade is complete, the site should be available.

2. We're moving from Western European encoding to UTF-8. This basically involves replacing all symbols, including quotes and quotations. This will be done automatically for everything on a standard English keyboard plus accented letters, tilde, etc., If you have other symbols in your chapters, and they don't translate to UTF-8, they'll be stripped. This probably won't affect anyone, but it's worth a warning in case someone is using symbols for a separator or something.

3. If you encounter display problems after the upgrade, hit control+F5 or clear your cache. Two browsers (Opera and Chrome) attempted to load old template files after the test run and a hard refresh (control+F5) or a cleared cache will take care of the problem.

4. All fanfiction links will change. However, old links will redirect to the new, shorter links indefinitely.

Other upgrades will follow this one in fairly rapid succession. The fanfiction area just took SOOO much time to get done. I really do apologize for the long delay in fixing problems in that area. After Thursday, you should be able to add, edit, and delete to your heart's content.

What I'm down to now is finishing Favorites, which isn't really major, and tidying up the story display. Then, permissions checks. That's not a lot to get done before Thursday, so we should be good to go.

The fanfiction feature that might not be done before Thursday is Story Alerts, and those can be added fairly easily next week if needed.

Please fasten your seatbelts and put your trays in an upright position, we are about to experience severe turbulence.

Everything looks great! Can't wait...but if I must, I must.

So beautiful! i am so excited for the new look! thanks Miss K!

I CAN"T WAIT!!!! Thanks for all your hard work Miss K.! Love you in a totally platonic way!

yeah we all love you in a totally hetero way! Lol:blink:

I'm all sorts of excited in so many different ways ! It looks awesome.

Lady K,
This looks awesome!
Definitely worth the downtime.
Thanks!!!!!

I have already ordered my monacle.

Very classy, very very chic new look. Simple and stylish and it won't get old. Timeless in fact. Looking forward to all the new upgrades very much. As always, phenomenal job, Miss Kagura!

EP

Miss K....I love you! The new look rocks! And the sakura symbol from Sesshoumaru's haori is going to take on iconic proportions...I can tell..... ::cheers::

OMG I am so ridiculously excited! This is going to be brilliant! I was trying to figure out what time that will be for me, but I will probably figure it out if the site doesn't load, haha!

Hi guys! Thanks so much for the comments. I'm changing the upgrade date to next Monday night.

Miss Kagura wrote:
I'm changing the upgrade date to next Monday night.

That is so cruel

Miss Kagura wrote:
Hi guys! Thanks so much for the comments. I'm changing the upgrade date to next Monday night.




CLIFFHANGER!

You're evil!!

lol

I'm pushing this up one more day, and that's the last delay, I swear!

Take all the time you need...

Yep were flexible (in the time sense not the physical sense.)....(unless you are, then in both senses.)

Nobody wrote:
Yep were flexible (in the time sense not the physical sense.)....(unless you are, then in both senses.)

All I can imagine is a human pretzel...