Hi all! I have a couple of maintenance announcements for you. For starters, I have a note from the host that a maintenance update is available for the forum. It looks like I should be able to apply the latest release without causing any downtime for the forum. If anything, it should be little more than a hiccup. We will definitely need to update the forum, because there were security enhancements listed in the description of changes.
I won't plan on doing this maintenance without plenty of advance notice though. I don't have an exact date, but I can tell you that it's likely to be after the first of the year, and it's likely to be a weekend. I know that's heavy chat time for many of you, but I can't be working on PAO maintenance from work. So there you have it.
The other maintenance issue is a little more complex. I've been looking for several weeks now for a solution that will integrate this forum with the home page. The reason for that is because I do pay attention to the enhancement requests from you ladies. The swap calendar is a prime example - I've been thinking about that nearly since the beginning. But it's not something I can build into the forum itself. It has to be something that's available off of the homepage. The ability to add stuff to the homepage is almost limitless. But I don't want people to have to register and log in twice. I've found something that looks like it will do the trick, but again, the setup may involve some downtime. I'd probably do it at the same time I upgraded the forum, and just make a day of it.
I'm currently looking at about the second weekend in January as a strong possibility (9-12). I'm going to continue to look at the software notes and see if there's any reason why I shouldn't be doing these installs, or if there are any major issues that anyone else has had. If the new authentication "bridge" works out, it will open up a world of possibilities. It will definitely make a swap calendar a breeze to set up, and it will allow for some of the other things that have been proposed, like the online live tutorials. All of those kinds of things can be set up off of the homepage site (paohome.paperartistsonline.com) without risk of damage to the forum, which is the very thing that brought us all together in the first place.
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