Planned Maintenance Notice - Pruning (Deleting) of Old Forum Content
Hi everyone 
As part of our planned forum upgrades this month, we will be deleting (also known as pruning) old information from the forum database. The details are as follows;
When?
Wednesday 22nd April, Noon, UK Time. This will continue for several hours before completion.
What data will be deleted?
- All posts and subforums in the following archives:
- Community Archives
- Staff Archives
- AL Journal Archives
- GD Archives
- VG Archives
- ClanNation Vault
- All threads with the last post dated over 4 years ago will be deleted.
- All private messages older than 4 years will be deleted.
- Any private messages which are older than 3 months and haven't yet been read will also be deleted.
Wait! What!? I want to keep my old stuff!
We will be taking a backup of the forum and database before the deletions. This will be made available as a read-only archive, so you can see old posts and private messages. We are planning to keep this backup available after the forum upgrades are completed, so you will still be able to access your old posts in the future.
if you have anything you *really* want to keep, then I still recommend that you make a backup of it before Wednesday.
Why do this?
The size of the Animeleague forum database has grown steadily over the years. We now have approx 4.4 million posts and 2 million private messages stored on the database. This makes the database approximately 6GB in size on our server. Having such a large database means that access times are getting slower, even with a fast server using an SSD hard drive (for those who don't know computing; this is quicker than a traditional drive). A large database also slows down maintenance or other work on the database.
We are planning to update the forum software in a couple of weeks, and we are hard at work sorting out everything for that. If we were to convert the 4+ million posts and 2 million pm's, the upgrade would take over 12 hours to complete. This isn't necessary for old content that is rarely used anymore. We will be making everything available on an archive, so any important old posts won't be lost, and so we can speed up the conversion to the new software.
After the pruning, and after the software updates, you should notice an increase in loading speed! The server will have a lot less work to do for the live system because we've trimmed down the database and forum software, so you will be able to post and chat much faster than currently
Will Animeleague go offline for this maintenance?
Nope! We will be able to stay online while we do the database pruning on Wednesday. However, you may notice the following:
- Server Lag
- Old Posts/Messages disappearing, or showing error messages when you try and access them
- Incorrect Forum Display Listings (applicable mainly to staff who have access to old sections, such as CN staff viewing the CN Vault)
When the pruning is complete, the forum caches will be updated, so these possible errors will end when maintenance is completed.
Future Plans
In approximately 2 weeks (so 1 week after the database pruning), we will be upgrading all the software we use on AL. This includes the server operating system, the version of php we use (server side scripting language used by the forum), and the forum software itself. This is a major upgrade to all our software which we have not been able to do for a few years, with many long term benefits. You should be aware that Animeleague, the Forums, the AL Chat, the AL Radio, the Event websites and everything else hosted on this server will go offline while we do these upgrades (in approx two weeks). This includes the event ticket/payment systems.
We will post a further announcement about this and the changes we're making when we have more information, so watch out for this!
Questions?
Please post them here and I'll answer them as best as I can.
