derien | The planned LiveJournal downtime tomorrow (Reply)

LiveJournal is going to be down tomorrow for at least four hours, they think, because they're moving their servers. What?? I know that stuff always goes wrong when technical upgrades and changes are going into effect and that it's good to warn people that there might be a few hiccups, but why on earth would they be planning to go down for four hours? All they should be doing is turning off the redundant servers, because everything should already be saving to both the regular and the new servers. I'm not a technical person, but I've seen a couple of server transfers on commercial websites from the backstage side, and the goal - which is possible if not probable - is usually to make it seamless and and completely unnoticed with no downtime. Planned downtime just looks... amateurish. They really need to hire someone like

eor.

And they send out a regular news email to tell us this and let us know what might happen. I only opened that email because it was a slow news day in my inbox, I don't usually read anything they send because most of it's usually crap I'm not interested in. They really should not send out so much crap, or at least find a way to make this one stand out, because there ARE going to be hundreds of people who never read it and flip out on them.

Talk it up, folks, so that your friends won't be as surprised when they can't get on LJ tomorrow.