Scheduled Downtime November 19-20 (for up to 4 hours)

News and Updates
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iNaturalist will be offline for up to 4 hours beginning at 7 pm Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8) on Wednesday, November 19 (that’s UTC 03:00 on November 20th). Click to see in your local time.

During this time, you will not be able to post observations from the mobile apps or interact with the website or API in any way. The iNaturalist Forum will still be active.

The timing will likely be most inconvenient for those in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. We apologize in advance for anyone who is inconvenienced. Please make other plans during that time.

Similar to past scheduled downtimes, this maintenance is required to better manage iNaturalist’s growing dataset but these behind-the-scenes improvements to the database will not be visible.

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Glad you can leave the forum up… :rofl:

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It’s run on Discourse.org servers and on Discourse software, so it’s unaffected by iNat’s maintenance.

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What kind of maintenance is being done that requires this?

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Does the down time begin Wednesday or Thursday? (the times and dates above are inconsistent)

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Wednesday, my fault. Corrected now, thanks.

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This always makes me laugh. So, most inconvenient for most of the world, then? (I understand that most users are in the Americas, particularly North, but it still sounds funny.)

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Suits me in Cape Town - the few morning hours when I am NOT on iNat :grin:

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I get the impression you never sleep, Diana, and are ALWAYS on iNat! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I know it really doesn’t affect me too much, being in the central time zone in the USA, but it does mean I will have to make my last check on iNat for the day before I go to bed a bit earlier. Wow. I guess I am living the first-world life if this is one of my bigger concerns right now :laughing:

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These downtimes are usually very conveniant for me. I am almost never on iNat Wednesday evenings so it typically doesn’t bother me at all.

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Split-screen with the Forum…

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Have been at Kirstenbosch … all day. And. NOT observing but enjoying!

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I’m not an engineer, but basically it’s to perform some database updates and cleaning that can’t really be done while the site is up and running.

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7pm is fine by me, I usually check my iNat notifications in the morning and then not really touch anything iNat related in the evening anyway :)

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Did the forum’s format change too? It seems slightly different. Like when you click on the likes button, it shows how many likes you got by putting them above in a little box instead of floating freely below.

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iNaturalist manages the forum, but the forum is run on Discourse.org software and hosted on Discourse.org servers (we pay a subscription for this). Changes to the forum are not linked to changes on iNat. As part of managing the forum we might make some changes, but Discourse also makes changes and pushes them out to the forums that use it.

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Unironically, a big red countdown would’ve been helpful when i was INTERRUPTED in identifying spilomelinae

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/for-taxon-changes-that-require-staff-how-do-we-actually-pass-them-off-to-staff/64890?u=austinsmith

I don’t know anything about the software engineering side, but could scheduled downtimes be useful for some of the issues raised in this thread? My thought was that maybe larger taxon changes that require a lot from the system would be easier to implement and monitor while the site is down.

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