iNaturalist will be offline for 2 hours beginning at 8 pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8) on Thursday, February 17 (click to see you your local time).
iNaturalist will be offline again for 8 hours the following week beginning at 7 pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8) on Thursday, February 24 (click to see you your local time).
During both of these times, you will not be able to post observations from the mobile apps or interact with the website or API in any way. The iNatForum will still be active.
The 8 hours of downtime on Feb 24-25 will likely be most inconvenient for those in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. We apologize in advance for anyone who is inconvenienced by the timing. Please make other plans during that time.
Similar to the scheduled maintenance around this time last year, we need to take iNaturalist offline for several hours to make changes to better manage the rapidly growing data.
“most inconvenient for those in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia” - and night owls in North America!
What am I supposed to do at night… sleep?
I’ve been using the site a lot recently so for that period of time I’ll probably be having a “what do I do with my life?!” moment! I’m sure it will be worth it though if it makes the site better. I look forward to seeing any positive changes. :)
It’ll be after dark here, so I’m gonna have to remember to load up on microscope specimens so I can spend the down time photographing those! Or maybe I’ll have to set up a moth light…
The changes are all behind the scenes to the database that should be undetectable to you if everything goes smoothly. In a nutshell, we need to make the database smaller by removing redundant fields and reorganizing tables so that processes like backups can happen more quickly (like a few hours instead of several hours).
So there won’t be new and exciting changes to point to immediately after this, but it’s important maintenance that needs to happen during the slower months of the year.
Thank you Carrie, some times we did not take notice of all this behind the sciences changes/adjustments, and only take a look when new fancy features come along, and we do not realice how importan these unnoticeable house keeping really are.
BTW
We should have a therapy session for ll of us during those times.
Just because it’s not very visible to users doesn’t mean it’s not important and I appreciate the effort anyway! Keeping the site running efficiently is always awesome. Thank you for elaborating!
The website was unavailable but you could still use the app but only to save observations for later posting. The database was updated as described above.
I wish we had flying squirrels here, we used to see them every so often where I grew up a bit north of here, but I have yet to see any signs of them where I live now.
