I have fixed the image layouts problem and now will go through the remaining issues of the feedback thread.

After that I will disable access to Antville.org again and give The Super Big ASOC’07 Update (Super BAU, heheh) another try.

Estimated downtime: Late afternoon evening of Wednesday, 7 May 2008 through the night until the next morning.

Please be prepared.

Oder wer auch immer für den (bzw. das Script zum) Wasted Comments Dump zuständig ist: welche API wird dafür verwendet?

Ein Test wäre ggf. angebracht...

You're still enjoying Antville 1.1.

Something went wrong with the layout image conversion and Elise's specific MySQL server version.

Bummer.

Better luck next time (which most likely will be today, Monday).

As there is a so-called "long" week-end approaching I think I will take a chance and try the Big "Version 1.2a" Update on Antville.org.

After all those years (almost four, I guess) here comes another huge update!

Of course, I won't do any work on Labour Day but expect Antville.org to be offline on Friday, 2. May 2008 and the following days (as long as it takes – fingers crossed that we'll make it until Sunday).

There's now a test installation of Antville 1.2 running on another server.

Feel free (or rather: feel kindly asked) to check out your own or your favorite weblog. Your Antville.org login should work there, too.

Note: The database snapshot of the test installation was reduced to content created between 1 January 2008 and 14 April 2008.

You might notice that not everything is fine. In fact, the whole thing could even crash ingloriously.

Don't worry – that's OK at least when you let me know about your findings, no matter how unimportant it might appear to you.

Please provide a URL which shows the (mis)behaviour and a sufficient description of what you have done.

I might know about a lot of issues already, though, but that should not hold you back at all. I am convinced there are still many uncovered bugs in the open.

Thus, please post your observations, questions and excitement right down below in the comments.

Well, here's the URL: p3k.org

I need a little bit of help from a MySQL-savvy person, so please forgive me the technical mumbo-jumbo following below.

The database update which is necessary for the Antville 1.2 upgrade takes long. Very long. Too long. I started it yesterday at 1:30 in the night and it is still running.

Well, you might say, haven't you written the update script yourself? Aren't you the guy who should know why it's running so slowly?

But I am really pretty clueless right now. Because all I am doing is issueing quite simple select, update and insert statements.

The problem might be, though, that it's Millions of them. During the first few hours everything goes quite smoothly, but after that each bulk of inserts or updates to a table (especially the one containing all the lovely postings of the Antville.org community) is interrupted with a break of a few minutes at first which in the meantime even exceeds ten minutes.

Thus, the update is taking longer and longer and longer. And of course I don't want Antville.org to be down for such a long time.

I already tried different things I found on various websites and in the depths of the MySQL documentation, even with some success in speeding up things a little bit.

But it's still not working out...

So my urgent request is: if you know how to optimize MySQL performance pretty good or you know someone else who does, please please please get in touch with me as soon as possible.

To keep you alert and planned ahead please expect some possibly longer outages due to maintenance work beginning next week-end, 19/20 April 2008, until the first weeks of May 2008 (if the prophecies are correct).

I will keep you updated about more specific schedules ASAP.

Furthermore, I am currently (ie. right now) testing various issues concerning setup and the like. Thus, errors or short outages could occur at any time.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.