The Teaspoon Community Journal

Hi folks,

I woke up this morning and discovered that a critical part of our database is down. I am trying to get in touch with our hosting provider to find out if there's anything I can do to recover it. This is ... not a great situation, to say the least, but I'll keep everyone posted.


ETA as of 9am Eastern: we're back!

Hi folks! The server decided to take an early holiday break. Time zones being what they are, our engineer won't be able to look into this for several more hours. I'll keep everyone posted here, on Twitter, and on Tumblr.

Thank you for your patience.

ETA as of 3pm EST: We're back! Go forth and enjoy some fic for your holiday.

Known issue: if you try to edit a chapter, the editing interface will load, but you'll see blank author's notes and story text fields. This is probably related to the fix put into place to address posting new stories, and our engineer will be looking into it. (And note that even though you'll see that empty story box, your content is still safe on our server and has not been deleted by clicking "edit chapter.")

In the meantime, if you need to edit a chapter, please copy the text and paste it into the story box. (Or better yet, make edits in your own document and paste or upload that into the story box.)

server migrations are just the best

ETA: as of 9:30pm UTC, this is fixed.

The site has been back up for a while (good) but attempting to post stories is yielding a database error (bad, obviously). We're looking into it and will update when we have more information.

ETA: As of 12:30am UTC, posting stories works again. Please contact us at help@whofic.com if you encounter any other issues.

Teaspoon will be migrating to a new server between 1pm UTC on Thursday, September 10 and 2am UTC on Saturday, September 12. (Use this site or any other converter to see UTC time in your local time zone.) During the migration, the server may be unavailable periodically, and to avoid potential data loss, we will not be approving stories until the migration is complete. I'll update this post once the migration is done.

ETA as of 1:30pm Eastern time: the site migration is complete, and the site is loading. DNS information is still propagating throughout the internet, though, so you may find that you aren't able to load it for the next 24-48 hours.

I've reported the outage to our hosting provider, who says it's an issue with the VPS node we're on. This means that it could be a few hours or more before we're back, but I'll update this post when I have more information.

ETA as of 9:46am EDT: We're back! Thank you for your patience.

Hi folks,

Unfortunately, we've been down for a solid half hour. I've been in touch with the hosting provider, and their support team should be looking into this soon. I'll post more information as soon as I have it, and apologies for the unexpected downtime.

9:24pm EST: We're back! Our hosting provider confirmed that there was hardware failure on their end, but everything is fixed now.

This weekend, we're upgrading our version of MySQL. While we don't anticipate any significant issues with the upgrade, please be advised that some downtime could occur.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment here, contact the mod team at help@whofic.com, or send me an ask on Tumblr.

During the weekend of December 28, we're going to switch Teaspoon's skin over to the beta skin we released earlier this year. We don't anticipate any downtime as part of this switchover, but obviously, will keep you all updated in the unlikely event something goes wrong.

What this means for you if you're still using the current "bluepurple" skin:

• We will be removing this skin entirely. It isn't responsive – that is, it doesn't scale smoothly from desktop monitor size down to phone screens – and we can't address lingering display issues in the beta "neospoon" skin until bluepurple is removed.


• That said, we have a responsive version of bluepurple ready to go! So if you prefer the current design to the new one, you'll still be able to switch to something that looks very similar to it. (It's got the same layout as neospoon, but uses bluepurple's color scheme and familiar crossed spoon/sonic screwdriver background.)

Any questions? Feel free to ask them here, contact us at help@whofic.com, or drop me an ask on Tumblr.

We are temporarily down. It’s an issue on our hosting provider’s end and affects other servers as well, so there’s unfortunately nothing we can do at the moment to fix things. We’ll be back as soon as we can.

ETA: We're back!