So, this weekend we made a series of key under-the-hood changes to Obsidian Fleet’s collection of websites. It led to a bit of disruption, hopefully most of which should be behind us over the next few days. So I thought I’d share what’s happened with you, dear fleet members and random readers of this wonderful bloggy community site.
The bits you can see
Waayyy back in Obsidian Day we announced the new IFS2 site would launch and had an address of http://www.obsidianfleet.tech. Over the months we’ve been adding bits, turning bits on, etc. on the site and have seen daily traffic double from the previous .net site. Admiral Sharr announced at the time that we’d eventually be moving back to obsidianfleet.net once we felt the site was performing superbly. We executed this change this weekend with fairly minimal disruption to the new IFS2 platform, which is always a good thing.
As a result of this change, we also enabled SSL. SSL’s the standard security mechanism for encrypting the connection between a web server and your computer. You can spot whether it’s turned on because you’ll see something like this on your browser.
This is SSL. Thanks to TheNextWeb for the picSo you can be assured that your connection between IFS2 and your PC is secure.
The bits you can’t really see
We’ve also enabled http/2 as a part of this change. http/2’s the improved, speedier version of http/1.1 and built for the modern web. It’s made a difference in the load time of the site, in that stuff just appears now. It might be marginally slower because of the security, but we’re looking at 0.4 seconds or so according to the tests and a 40% reduction in the number of requests made to the server which is nice. We’ve also enabled PHP7.1 which is even quicker than PHP7. Sadly this broke the incoming email system so I’m probably going to revert it back to PHP7 while we wait for the plugins to catch up.
Stuff which isn’t working proper like
UoM folders and bits which were hosted on the IFS1 site. That’s going to be sorted within the next day or two.
More stuff which isn’t working proper
There’s not a lot really. Most of the issues are now at the user-end. The most common one we’re seeing is usernames and password reset requests. Your obsidianfleet.tech password now logs you into obsidianfleet.net so please take the time to edit your password managers with the correct web address and it’ll fix it. It beats requesting a password, resetting a password, etc. etc.
The second issue is cache-related. This is what’s causing users to bounce along happy and then hit a 404 error. You can fix that by emptying your cache.
You can find out how to do that here for Chrome. Similar principles for Firefox and Android too. Edge users … I’m assuming there’s a function somewhere.
As always, you can ping for help in Discord’s IFS2-help channel, or the forums, or email [email protected] or leave a comment below.