User talk:Darren Duncan

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun!

Welcome Darren David Tribe 23:35, 22 January 2007 (CST)

Nomination for the Management Council

You have been nominated for a seat on the Management Council in the July-August Special Election. The nominator was myself. To accept or decline this nomination, please visit the Nominations page by midnight UTC on July 27th. You may write an election statement for each if you wish (linked from the Nominations page).

The Management Council seat expires on either June 30th, 2014, or June 30th, 2015 (the successful candidate with fewest voting receiving the shorter term). In the event that Referendum 1 is passed, all seats will expire on June 30th, 2014. Thanks! John Stephenson 17:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Server migration

Does this mean citizendium will be completely offline for a few weeks ? This will severely downgrade search engine rankings for articles and impose negative penalties. Pradyumna Singh 05:51, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Pradyumna, that can't be helped, though we can try and minimize it. Migration will happen faster if the server can go down before it starts so we don't have to start and then sync edits after. Also, the key thing to save money is to decommission the old servers. So the plan is to shutdown services, then copy the whole filesystems of the old servers to the new ones, and verify the copy, and then do the longer process of moving things around and editing files so Citizendium works again in the new location. The shutdown period's first day or three is copying everything over to make sure nothing's lost, then start saving money; most of the remaining time is however long it takes to rearrange things on the new server so things work again, but during most of the downtime we're only paying for 1 server rather than 4. Likely services will come up piecemeal. The main wiki can be prioritized so to minimize search engine ranking issues and say the Simple Machines forum can come later, for example. Taking the pain of some downtime will greatly reduce the total amount of time needed to complete the migration, and also it means the existing funds should last several more months than otherwise even without new donations. I think its worth it. Probably fixing whatever's up with emails will be a priority too as it affects signups apparently. Darren Duncan 06:16, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Effect of Website Downtime on Rankings

However if, after several days, Google’s web crawler still cannot access a certain website, then it is forced to conclude that the site must not exist anymore and it will drop the site from the search index.

Presumably the site can be re-indexed, but it will take a bit of SEO and some new links pointing to the domain. Fortunately, Google is somewhat forgiving with temporary downtime, but the lesson of this video for webmasters is that website uptime is important, and that several days of downtime can cause permanent loss of position in Google’s index. 06:26, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Isn't it possible to freeze, ie. block all editing and login access to the old server and keep the old server running only to deliver web pages, while the transition is taking place. The impact of going offline for more than a few days is going to wipe CZ off Google and Bing for at least a year. Pradyumna Singh 06:26, 29 November 2014 (UTC)