Howdy Community Members,
We want to share a brief update on our Thurrott Relaunch Project.
- As part of the Thurrott Relaunch Project, the site will be offline in maintenance mode Saturday morning (US ET Time) as we make updates to key parts of our platform, the Thurrott.com Core. These updates will bring our CMS, Transaction Processing, and CMS Plugins up to date. This is a key milestone and foundational for the upcoming site improvements. This maintenance outage is not expected to last more than 3 hours. I will update the community in this thread following successful completion. These types of updates can create unforeseen issues and while we will be carefully testing the updates, we appreciate your feedback to [email protected] should you encounter challenges.
- As we shared in our recent updates via email and the AMA event, our project plan is agile, so that we can adjust to insights and knowledge gained during the process. Prioritizing this weekend’s Thurrott Core Update is an example of such a change. Pausing for this weekend’s maintenance work is a prudent re-sequencing of the project plan.
- Within the next couple of weeks, we will launch the new OpenWeb comment system. After collaboration and analysis with our internal team and external partners, we are optimistic that we can launch the much improved commenting experience very soon without losing commenting history and without taking down the forum posting functionality, as was previously expected. You may have recently experienced additional outages or site slowdowns. Our technical analysis during these most recent occurrences points us to issues with the spam moderation plugin that is creating a serious performance ‘drain’. OpenWeb implementation part of our new Phase 2.0 will feature advanced AI moderation tools.
- Additionally, we no longer expect to pause new basic or Premium membership enrollment during the relaunch phase. We will continue to optimize our plans and communicate updates as we go.
The project phases have been refined as follows:
- Phase 1.0 – Thurrott.com Core Update [Saturday]
- Phase 2.0 – New Comment System and site performance & stability improvements [in approximately 2 weeks]
- Phase 3.0 – New site theme. Many additional site issues will be resolved and additional improvements in performance [July/August]
Final note, we are sad to report that Nick Tirrell has recently left BWW Media Group. Nick has been an instrumental member of the team, and had an opportunity that was “too good to pass up”.
We appreciate your continued patience and support through this process … I can assure you that we are continuing to charge forward more aggressively than ever!
George Coll
CEO & Managing Partner
BWW Media Group