The Straight Dope Software Switch Countdown thread!

[thorny_locust]

Over in another thread we’ve just been reminded of this, which was part of the first announcement:

@TubaDiva

Sometime that Thursday we will set the board to be in “Read Only” mode. We will get a final data dump of all of the posts/content up to that point, and send it over to Discourse to do their migration. Hopefully the migration will be finished by Friday.

Then we will kick the tires of the Discourse install, make sure everything is good to go, then switch the DNS settings to point the existing SDMB to the new Discourse install and we will be open for business as soon as that propagates. This means you’ll use the same URL for getting to the SDMB as now. And it also means all the old existing thread URLs should automatically work properly, in case you have any bookmarked.

So presumably the first symptom will be, not an inability to get at the boards to read them, but an inability to post; at least, if I’m understanding it right. Then, possibly simultaneously but that’s not clear, trying to get to the boards will get us to Discourse, and presumably looking at a page telling us to update our passwords.

I’d think that the inability to post wouldn’t show up as a 502 or 504, but either as a “down for maintenance” or as its own message; but I don’t know about that, that’s just a guess.