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).