Admin's logbook

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Major update to Discourse v1.4

Disourse updated to 1.4.3 and also some minor tweaks to the back-end.

I have been very happy to notice that we have finally attracted some active members, driven by the Windows tablet enthusiasts. I am a Linux die hard, but hey - everyone is welcome and indeed those devices are interesting :relaxed:. Keep the posts coming and remember that we are not focused or restricted to any specific topic. Anything that touches the field of ICT and tickles the brain is good!

Major platform update, as we just started tracking the Discourse Beta branch, and therefore upgraded to v1.5 beta. This should bring us lot of improvements and fixes, but there is also some potential for bugs.

Upgraded to Discourse 1.5 beta 8. Minor visual tweaks as well.

Discourse upped to beta 11+ and Docker to 1.10.

  • Major back-end changes, as I decided to try another VPS hosting provider that provides more resources at a lower price point. So we have a new server with double RAM.
  • Discourse now at 1.5b13

More back-end tuning. Attached images and other files are now hosted in Amazon S3.

We have just enabled https / SSL encryption on this site, courtesy of Let’s Encrypt. Let me know if you notice any issues.

I’m also using let’s encrypt; it’s nice but I wish you didn’t have to renew so often, even if it’s schedulable :stuck_out_tongue: . Anyway, this is a nice site to see if the ssl/https is implemented properly:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=cd-rw.org

You can get an A+ if you set up HSTS to be more strict (my site:
SSL Server Test: toxme.io (Powered by Qualys SSL Labs) )

Otherwise, yay for SSL!

Let’s Encrypt support is baked into Discourse so, that it should auto-renew the cert and therefore be “set it and forget it”-solution. There has been some bugs in the implementation during spring, thus I have not enabled it earlier. Bu tnot it seems to be ready for production, so let’s see how it goes.

Also the solution here is two-fold, as I use CloudFlare CDN in front of this website. I have not yet enabled HSTS is CloudFlare settings, but the support is there.

Some back-end updates today:

  • Updated to Discourse 1.5.3
  • Migrated to an energy efficient server at ScaleWay. We were running out of disk space, and even their cheapest offer has 50GB of SSD.
  • Discovered issues with out Twitter authentication - this should now be fixed.

A post was split to a new topic: Affordable VPS hosting

It seems that we have had a very sneaky issue of our ISP blocking the outgoing emails (SMPT ports) for a few days. Should be now fixed.

As a result a bunch of failed emails will now be sent out at once. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We just upgraded to Discourse 1.6, which brought a number of changes to the UX.

Discourse security update to 1.6.1.

Yesterday we did a Discourse security update to 1.6.2.

Did a complete front-end and back-end update. Now running on Discourse 1.6.6.

Brief downtime today, as we switched to a different server. Site should be a little more snappy and responsive now. While at it, upgraded everything so now running Discourse 1.6.9.