Site Construction (June of 2020 Bonus Edition)

As you will have noticed if you've visited the site in the last few days, things are under heavy construction. This will serve as your thread of choice if you have any questions, or if you spot something that is broken but shouldn't be.

At the start of things, pretty much the ENTIRE site was busted. That's not the case anymore. Here is a list of functions that should be back to normal:

* Review pages
* News article pages
* Guides (both creation and display)
* Site forums
* Review submission form
* News article submission form (for staff)
* Submissions queue (so staff can approve reviews and other such content)
* Game asset submissions (if your account is authorized)
* Game artwork submissions (if your account is authorized)
* Site search
* Game profile pages
* System profile pages, plus alphabetical browsing

Here is a list of some key features that have not yet returned but should be coming soon:

* Staff tools to submit and modify game profiles
* HG Mail
* Blogs (all pages)
* Game collection management
* Review archives
* News archives
* Guide archives
* Site account settings management
* HG Mail
* Activity Notifications
* Users pages
* Assorted staff tools
* Site contact form

I hope to bring all of the above (and anything else I may have temporarily forgotten about) very soon. Most of the hardest work now appears to be complete, and the rest should follow with reasonable quickness. My hope is that I'll have everything back to normal--or very close to it--by the end of my weekend, which concludes this coming Monday, June 29.

This outage was not planned, and fixing everything is unfortunately taking longer than I had hoped because I have to carefully review nearly every line of code on the site to avoid issues. Once the site is completely back, there may still be some minor issues here and there to iron out, but I've been testing as I go and hopefully anything I miss will be very minor.

Thank you for your patience as I work through this. The end is finally in sight!

Tonight/this morning (all depends on your time zone) has been productive, so I have a few updates to share.

Users who may have logged out of their accounts should now be able to log in again. If they've forgotten their password, they can reset it. If they never had an account in the first place, they can create one. Features to modify your account (and to update your avatar) are now fixed. It's also possible to submit a site contact to staff. And anyone who is signed into their account can now use HG Mail again, with all functions working.

If you have a different experience than promised with any of the above things, please let me know so I can fix anything that may be broken, though I've done what testing I can myself and encountered no issues.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is my Friday this week, and after work tomorrow evening I hope to add staff tools so we can view site contacts and process them. I also hope to add tools so staff can submit and modify game profiles again, which will be nice because I have a bunch of Switch games to add and we'll want to be able to add other listings as news coverage resumes next week. Once those tools are added, then I'll likely be prioritizing the Reviews, News and Guides pages linked from the top bar on the site, and then I'll be going through to tend to a bunch of less commonly accessed pages. Blogs and game collection pages will likely come somewhere in the middle of that, hopefully by Monday evening, and then we should be basically back to normal except for any bugs you or I might discover along the way.

The site is almost completely restored, and for most folks, it might as well be. This weekend was rough, with severe plumbing issues taking up most of my available time, but this afternoon and evening (Monday into very early Tuesday morning) I was able to get some important staff tools added AND was able to restore blogs almost completely.

What's left to do? I need to add tools to manage game collections and the RSS feeds and sitemap. That'll finish up blogs, and I have a few pages around the main site. From there, all that's left to do is fix some staff tools and then the site will finally be back to normal. It's possible I will be able to do most or all of that tonight (Tuesday), though two full days may wind up being required. Anyway, for now it's time for me to get some sleep.

As always, thank you for your patience as I finish this process!

I've removed the notice about site construction that was appearing on most pages of the main site, even though construction still isn't quite finished, because it's at this point close enough to done that a lack of messaging shouldn't cause anyone too much concern.

Blogs should be back at 100% now, including game collection management tools. Next up, I'll target a few incidental pages around the site, then some staff tools that only I ever use, and then I will be ready to start improving things again and gently polishing rather than scrambling to address a crisis. Thanks for sticking around through the chaos, and enjoy the site!

All good news. It would have just added to the whole "2020 is a pure shitshow" vibes if, after getting way into PS Now's library, the site self-terminated and I lost my outlet to write about all the wacky stuff I'm playing.

Well, everything falling apart like it did certainly didn't improve MY year, but I'm glad I've been able to bring everything back and keep the site going without an even longer interruption than has been necessary.

Great work in bringing the site back from being 2020'd. I know you put a lot of hours get this place back up and running; I hope, at least, you've learnt a few useful things during that time. I don't think you often get the props you're due for your works on the digital guts of this site, and you've done a hell of a job this time around. I'll say something nice about a Nintendo franchise at some point in your honour

Thanks, EmP! All I have left to address now are pages that only I ever see and use, so it's a relief to have the site back to what it was.

I did learn some stuff during the process--useful stuff--and I will try to apply some of that new knowledge going forward. Also, because the site is now designed around a much newer version of PHP, any big changes that might happen in the future will be MUCH easier to fix.

We shouldn't see any future outages of an extended nature, or on a site-wide level, barring unlikely scenarios such as a server move. This is a change that has arguably needed to happen for some time, and the timing just sucked. But the timing for such things always sucks, and I guess it was especially fitting that things should get so rough during this crapfest of a year that is 2020!