@tiwane I know this is a huge ask, but is there any chance that the maintenance scheduled for a few days time could be pushed forwards 12 hours?? I’m running a bioblitz for a second-year invertebrate biology class. The dates were planned a few months ago for this Thursday and Friday. On Thursday the kids collect, and then on Friday they come back to the area and work in the labs to upload all their pics to iNat and ID them. This uploading/IDing is meant to go from 9am-5pm on the Friday (Sydney time); the maintenance is scheduled to run from 1-5pm on the same day, so half of their day would be gone.
In fact, even just a delay of 4 hours (so it starts at 5pm) would be incredible if possible. It’d cut down on the time that other users can ID their stuff for them, but they’re expected to ID everything themselves anyway and only ask for help as a last resort. I assume that would be less of a hassle, so a delay of 4 hours would be amazing if you can.
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I’m sorry to hear our scheduled maintenance will conflict with your class BioBlitz. We try to minimize maintenance downtime as much as possible, and only schedule long downtimes a couple times a year. We also try to give several days notice for these long downtimes, and I’m glad you saw the notification. The maintenance tasks we will be performing Thursday are also something that we’ve been working on for quite some time. We will be upgrading one of our backend databases. Timing is very important for this update, and in fact some parts of the process have been in motion since last week, and if we were to reschedule we’d lose that time and need to start over.
I am sympathetic to the fact that you’ll be affected by this downtime, and I apologize for that, but we believe the best course of action is to stick to our scheduled time. iNaturalist has grown to be a very large international platform, and no matter when we take the site offline there will be likely thousands of people affected. During this downtime the website will be offline as will all online data editing and data access capabilities. The mobile apps will be able to work the same as they do now when offline (i.e. you can create observations on the apps, but not submit them), and the Seek app will remain mostly functional (with some API calls and data submission offline).
Again, we don’t take downtime lightly, and understand many people are affected each time the site goes offline. At the same time iNaturalist is growing very rapidly, and we must always be using the best technology that will help our infrastructure scale accordingly. This upgrade is part of that ongoing scaling, and I believe iNaturalist and all our users will benefit from this in the long run (and we may be able to roll out new features later on because of it).
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No worries Patrick, I fully understand, cheers for the response. Classic Murphy’s Law in action.
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Maintenance downtime scheduled for Friday 7pm to 11pm PDT
congrats
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…for an unrelated reason, as it turns out. Unless @thebeachcomber has figured out how to control North American weather… 
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Anyone feel free to email me if you guys need any events cancelled or delayed >:)
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If only if each one of us had the powers to stop wars, bomb cyclones…
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For my iNat friends further north on the east coast of Australia, I’d like to add bushfires to that list.
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I’m heading up to some of my favourite trails in a few weeks, worried that everything will be obliterated…
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