Broken MT Update

The installation of Movable Type on this site was a couple[1] of versions behind so last night I decided to update the site to version 4.37.

Unfortunately, while carrying out the update, I skipped a vital step. I forgot to copy over the many site specific plugins which are installed here. This meant that for approximately ten hours overnight (UK time) the site was broken and it was impossible to create new blog entries or to post comments.

I think the problem has been fixed and the site should now be back to normal.

Apologies for the problems. I'll be more careful next…

Text Entered Was Wrong

Many people have been seeing the cryptic error message "Text Entered Was Wrong" when trying to use this site. It was caused by MT expecting to see the response from a CAPTCHA which wasn't being displayed.

It's taken us a while to get to the bottom of this problem, but we think that we have fixed it now. We think that the CAPTCHA will now be displayed in all of the circumstances when MT thinks it has been displayed.

Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. Hopefully this will allow a larger select…

blogs.perl.org Feedback

This site has live been on the new hardware for a while now and things seem to be a lot more stable than they were previously.

There are, however, still a few issues that are left over from the old system and which are causing problems for some users (and some potential users). One particular problem that we keep coming across is that of accounts that were half-created on the old system. If you think you set up an account but you can't log in here or if you log in successfully but the system says you don't have permission to pos…

What Can We Improve?

Ok, so it seems that the memory allocation errors on blogs.perl.org are finally behind us and we're working our way through the list of users who were semi-signed-up during the bad old times.

That means it's probably time to start looking ahead and discussing what improvements we can make to the system. The project team have an internal bug-tracking tool (er... ok... spreadsheet) which we'll make public very soon, but we're keen to have your ideas too.

We want to hear about two types of things. Firstly there's the actual bugs that you find - what's broken when you use the…

Migration Issues

It looks like something didn't go quite as planned in the migration yesterday and now we seem to have lost some of the most recent posts. It looks like we're missing stuff from about midnight on 8th December to just before midday today.

Sorry about that. We now have a database back-up strategy in place that means we'll always have far more recent backups available. I'm sure this was a migration glitch and nothing more serious.

I'm so glad I put that "Beta" tag on the logo :-)