Weekends are my time to upgrade our forum and publishing sites, because most of ya’ll are getting epic family or game-time in rather than trolling Off Topic.
There have been several significant updates with the latest versions of Discourse and Ghost. Here are the highlights.
Forum (Discourse)
You can now set your polls to automatically close! Finally!
“Likes” have become a heart icon. Heart icon is now empty if you haven’t liked a post. Spread the love and fill some hearts.
Group cards now shown in user profile. This is a feature I’ve been waiting for for a most evil plan I’ve had since the beginning. Muhaha. Muahahahaha! (You’ll hopefully see this in use soon.)
Relative dates and times. You can now insert a time that will be automatically converted to the reader’s timezone. Like so: May 6, 2018 9:00 AM.
Publishing (Ghost)
Allow multiple authors per post (I’ll try and update our theme to make use of this as soon as possible).
Dropped Node v4 support
Various fixes and improvements
Nearly messed up big-time
In an effort to keep the hosting bill as small as possible, I was testing to see if it would be possible to migrate Discourse to a smaller droplet at Digital Ocean (it’s just $5 a month, but if I can save R60 a month, why not?).
Lesson learnt: don’t do this tired (which is difficult when you’re trying to do this stuff late at night when no-one else is on). I accidentally did the copy from the existing droplet to the new droplet in the wrong direction, overwriting key files on our live server.
No downtime, mercifully, and I made a backup before attempting anything, so I restored the backup and everything should be fine.
Please let me know if you run into any issues. Just want to make sure my idiocy hasn’t caused any lasting problems.
Release notes
Here are links to the full Discourse and Ghost release notes for those who want to take a look.
Crap! There is definitely a problem… The browser where I’ve logged in before works fine, but elsewhere there are JavaScript errors.
If anyone has time to try and see what might be causing the problem, please let me know. Worst case is I’ll do a reinstall on a fresh server tonight and migrate the data over.
*EDIT: In the meantime do not log out!
*EDIT 2: The issue does not appear to be related to my attempted breaking of the servers (the problem is replicated on the staging server which I mercifully left up after the upgrade). I have also tested it against multiple desktop browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and got the same result.
I have a sneaky suspicion it might be related to a plugin. Specifically, the one we use to display the ad. Will be able to test more later.
For now there appears to be a workaround — go to an article, click “Continue Discussion”. A version of the site will load with a login button at the top.