News 10/10/2013 - Regular Scheduled Maintenance

[TAG Manager]

Hi everyone!

The regular monthly maintenance is planned as usual for the second Thursday of the month, October 10th. For this maintenance period, there will be a lot of changes going into this update. Please expect some downtime on Thursday this week as some of the changes will take some time to implement.

A short summary of changes planned for Thursday's maintenance:

• Web & Database Server - Multiple Upgrades + Database Conversion
• Upgrade of Core Platform Software
• Upgrade of Private Conversation System
• Upgrade of Moderator Tools
• Upgrade of Search System
• Feature Additions (more details at the time of maintenance)
• Planned by not fully confirmed: Site design changes.

Additionally, we will be refreshing the Tapatalk support system to repair the broken user alerts system. If you are one of our many Tapatalk users, you may need to delete and add your TAG profile to Tapatalk on or after Thursday. We are hoping to fix the issue around push alerts before Thursday and effectively cancelling this part of the maintenance.

During the maintenance period, you may get blank screens or 'server not responding' messages. Please come back and try at a later time if you should not be able to access the site.

A confirmation will be posted once the maintenance is fully completed.

We appreciate your support and understanding.

 

[TAG Manager]

In regards to today's planned updates, they will will broken apart in a few segments to assure that each step has no impact on other functions. While in testing, there were no issues, I would prefer to step through each stage with a live check before moving to the next step.

As a reminder you may experience one or all of the follow:

• Unresponsive Pages / Server Not Found
  
• Error Responses
• Blank/White Pages
• Site Closed Message

There is no need to report any issues until the all-clear announcement has been made. If there are any residual issues afterwards, please feel free to report those error in the feedback section or sending an email with details to helpdesk@tokyoadultguide.com.

Yahoo email users, please take note: Any emails sent from Yahoo! or requesting a reply to a Yahoo! email account, may not get our reply. We are still be blocked in certain cases by Yahoo's email servers. This applies to any email account containing a Yahoo or Ymail suffix.

Lastly, the start time of the system updates will be 1:30 PM JST.

 

[TAG Manager]

Stage I of maintenance has been completed successfully. Most users should notice a marked increase in site speed/responsiveness.

Stage II will begin shortly, but should not affect the site for any noticeable amount of time.

 

[TAG Manager]

The major maintenance period has now been completed.

A short summary:

• Web & Database Server - Multiple Upgrades + Database Conversion - Completed.
  
• Upgrade of Core Platform Software - Completed.
• Upgrade of Private Conversation System - Completed.
  
• Upgrade of Moderator Tools - Completed.
  
• Upgrade of Search System - Completed.
  
• Feature Additions (more details at the time of maintenance) - Completed.
  
• Planned by not fully confirmed: Site design changes.- Not Completed, Back in the pending box.

Major points for the changes today:

1) Major overhaul of Private Conversation System: Groups, Message Prefixes, Sticky Conversations, Read Receipts, Auto Responders & Display Changes
2) Upgrade of Moderator Tools - Nothing major in this change, just some added tools to support moderator tasks as well as approval control over name changes.
3) Upgrade of Search System - More detailed searching, including searches of your conversations. This is preparatory step for further search enhancements to come later.
4) Feature Additions - Ability to change your user name, once every 90 days. You may request to change your user name via your user control panel. (previously used names are not available for use.) Bookmarks: You can now use the bookmark feature to mark important threads or links that you want to come back to.
5) Other changes have been put in place for better monitoring as well as some framework for a future upgrade that involves a facelift and additional speed/performance points.

What is not fixed: Push notifications on Tapatalk. We're working on this....

For any technical person that may be interested, we officially dropped MySQL in favor of MariaDB. Additionally, we have pushed out all legacy code that was dependent on older PHP versions which puts us up on the latest PHP release. The MariaDB and PHP changes have proven to be a powerful combination in improving the site's responsiveness and overall feeling. Further upgrades and optimizations will be done on the DB server and the caching system.

Now, if anyone finds any bugs or has problems with any functions, please drop us a note in the feedback forum or send an email as previously noted, to: helpdesk@tokyoadultguide.com

Thank you for your continued support of our mission at TAG.