What happened to the forum last week?

[paikkos]

The forum was down for a couple of days (at least that as many days as I noticed) last week. There doesn't seem to be any way to notify someone or get any feedback about the status of the forum from anywhere. Do we know what happened? What can we do if the forum goes down, are there other channels for Scalix discussions? Without the help from this forum, problems are not solvable. It's a vital tool for commercial users like me.

Thanks,
Dermot.

[William]

My guess is that the wiki and forums databases were being transferred?

[paikkos]

It really felt like we were left in the cold. It would have been nice to have a message to say it was down for maintenance. I got paniced that Scalix had folded!

[beaner1111]

For all intents and purposes, Scalix HAS folded... they just don't know it yet...

[paikkos]

Are you just being witty or is there some evidence you can can show to back up that statement?

[florian]

The forum wasn't down for maint and it wasn't being moved anywhere. The provider who is hosting the forum and associated database had some issues with the respective systems, and when they were brought back up, some software version mismatches were creeping in and had to be figured out. As it had been running smoothly for almost five years on the same infrastructure, admins had to refresh their own knowledge about the bells and whistles of it.

I'll not link this statement to any other part of the discussion, but, as a personal comment, I think some of the conclusions drawn here go a little bit to far.

As for the forum being a "critical business tool", I'm certainly ok seeing it called a "very valuable resource", but in terms of criticality, I may want to remind you that it does not come with a SLA, neither on its operations nor on response times, and it never has. So building on it as a "critical" factor for anything would not really stand any formal compliance testing.

Cheers from Internet Security Days,
Florian.

[paikkos]

There were a number of factors that made me concerned. There has been a change in the parent company; The site being down and no notice anywhere that it was down for maintenance; There has not been a new release for quite some time and no road map. It didn't fill me with confidence.

Perhaps critical is an over-statement but as a general point of reference, this forum is very important. You cannot log a support call whenever there is a trivial matter to resolve. Especially when you know the answer is sitting in a post in this forum somewhere.

[florian]

To be clear, my comment wasn't meant to address the bigger subject, as I am really not in the position to make this type of official statement for a company that I'm only associated with in a very limited way; therefore I only wanted to provide facts about what I saw as going slightly overboard in discussions. Also, as I was behind the original definition for the positioning/role of the forum in Scalix' communication components, I wanted to speak out on the SLA topic.

The involvement of a new owner, btw., hasn't had any impact on infrastructure and service locations for Scalix, afaik.

Anyway, hope this clears some misunderstandings up.
Florian

[paikkos]

Well if nothing else, I'm glad to see your still involved in forum. Continuity helps.