Updated 6/25/2022 @ 9am ET – Thurrott Relaunch Status

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

Conversation 19 comments

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    24 June, 2022 - 2:22 pm

    <p>Hi George, thanks for the update.</p><p><br></p><p>Sorry to hear Nick has left the team, but wish him all the best at his new job.</p>

  • j5

    Premium Member
    24 June, 2022 - 4:42 pm

    <p>That status update is much appreciated, thanks George.</p>

  • lwetzel

    Premium Member
    24 June, 2022 - 5:52 pm

    <p>Thanks!</p>

  • willr

    24 June, 2022 - 7:51 pm

    <p>Please tell me the site is getting a dark mode option??? This is one of the best tech blogs but my goodness the lack of dark mode option is horrible for night time browsing</p>

    • George Coll

      Premium Member
      24 June, 2022 - 10:54 pm

      <p>This step in our update isn’t going to bring new features or capabilities, but is foundational for getting to those soon.</p><p><br></p><p>Dark mode is coming, not quite yet!</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      26 June, 2022 - 3:57 am

      <p>I use Noir on my iPad and on Safari on my Mac and Darkreader with Firefox (it is also available for Chrome based browsers). Noir is really excellent, Darkreader is not as good, but acceptable for most sites that don’t offer a dark mode. Obviously, a native dark mode for the site is better.</p>

  • George Coll

    Premium Member
    25 June, 2022 - 10:19 am

    Good morning,

    We are nearing the completion of the Thurrott Core Update. The maintenance outage was minimal, only minutes. We are aware of a few issues and are working through those issues. For example, comments currently have issues and we are actively working on a solution.

    Thank you for your patience,

    George

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      25 June, 2022 - 10:36 am

      <p>So far so good! :)</p>

      • danbear2929

        28 June, 2022 - 7:23 am

        <p>Can’t wait.. should be a great re-launch.</p><p>hopefully in the mean time we won’t see another poorly top gun movie being made ? </p>

  • George Coll

    Premium Member
    25 June, 2022 - 11:43 am

    <p><strong><u>UPDATE:</u></strong></p><p>The Thurrott Core Update was successfully completed. Please share any issues you may encounter. I assure you we will investigate quickly. Thank you all for your support. Our plan transitions to implementing the new comment system … stay tuned!</p><p>George</p>

    • navarac

      25 June, 2022 - 4:31 pm

      <p>Still a delay in logging onto the site with Cloudfare full-screen rubbish checking my browser.(@2030 GMT 25 Jun 22)</p><p><br></p><p>FYI I might add that Thurrott.com is the ONLY site of hundreds I access that has this Cloudfare rubbish screen showing and delaying access to a site.</p>

      • George Coll

        Premium Member
        25 June, 2022 - 5:26 pm

        <p>We understand your frustration. I assure you that we are working hard to fully relaunch Thurrott.com and resolve this and many more issues. We appreciate your patience and support. </p>

        • George Coll

          Premium Member
          25 June, 2022 - 6:57 pm

          <p>I would also like to add in the spirit of full transparency, last night’s activities were not intended to resolve the performance issues that are still requiring the cloudflare precautions.</p><p><br></p><p>We are hopeful that implementing the new comment system will be that enabler to achieve the performance improvement. Our plans are to launch the new comment system within the next couple of weeks.</p>

  • arjay

    26 June, 2022 - 2:39 pm

    <p>Thanks for the update. Hope the new launch will solve the problem of the site regularly forgetting my login credentials.</p>

  • Brad Sams

    Premium Member
    27 June, 2022 - 9:22 am

    <p>Woohoo!</p>

    • George Coll

      Premium Member
      27 June, 2022 - 12:23 pm

      <p>Howdy Brad Sams :)</p>

  • George Coll

    Premium Member
    27 June, 2022 - 1:53 pm

    <p>Community Members, </p><p><br></p><p>We are seeing improved resource utilization from this past weekend’s Thurrott Core Update and therefore w<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">e have taken steps to remove the Cloudflare precautions that have been irritating all of us for the past couple of months. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Also, there has been a longstanding issue where non-premium members had not been able to see images on premium articles when using one of your 3 premium article tokens. This issue has been resolved. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We continue to charge ahead aggressively — not recklessly! — our eyes are wide open on alert for issues. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Thanks again for the amazing support of this community. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">George</span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

  • pecosbob04

    30 June, 2022 - 12:53 pm

    <p>"<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Also, there has been a longstanding issue where non-premium members had not been able to see images on premium articles when using one of your 3 premium article tokens. This issue has been resolved."</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="ql-cursor"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">A longstanding issue where non-premium members had not been able to see comments in premium articles when using one of your 3 premium article tokens. This issue has </span><strong style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">NOT</strong><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> been resolved.</span></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC