As the old saying goes:
Prod is just dev and test rolled into one, but with much more screaming
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@emva That made me chuckle 
I use the forum with Sailfish Browser, as all co-operative sites. Vivaldi on Android App Support is a backup (I need daily, sadly…)
@vige Good luck with finishing the update! It’s great to see this platform being updated, so hopefully the story of TJC won’t repeat itself 
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To me (with dev & some devops experience) it sounds like: “This cms / system is contained in the database. It is not realistically possible to revert the update without reverting the entire db.” And yes, I know about the ‘bad decision to have the system in the db’ discussion.
I am. Do we have other browser Options? As this is news to mr
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They have reverted the forum to a previous version of the discourser software which still works with the latest stock browser in 4.3 and earlier ones. However, that has resulted in the loss of a lot of posts made in the days between when the discourser upgrade happened and when it was later reverted. Apparently it was not possible to take a backup of the forum before it was reverted to an earlier state, hence the lost posts.
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@teleshoes, @direc85, @Steve_Everett, please mind that Jolla does not run this Discourse instance, it is a SaaS provided by Discourse Inc., as noted before. As outlined there, they sell zero administration and promise zero moderation, which I assume to be major reasons why Jolla has chosen this SaaS offer.
This answers all “i could also ask:”-questions by @teleshoes: Because Jolla does not administer this Discourse instance and they are paying money in order to not pay any attention.
This also explains why fiddling with the database of this Discourse instance (taking backups, merging entries etc.) is out of scope: Jolla does not have the know-how and resources to do that, plus the contract with Discourse Inc. presumably does not cover that. What obviously was covered was a roll-back to a snapshot of the whole container (in which this Discourse instance runs) taken some time before the update was deployed.
So far this is the sad, modern world of SaaS and outsourcing in general: Companies make themselves helpless, dependent slaves of service providers, which solely fulfil their contractual obligations. And when the internal know-how is gone, it is very hard to build it up again.
But for Jolla’s deliberate decision to let Discourse Inc. roll back to a snapshot many ten hours old, just to keep the facade that “everything is fine”, which includes erasing the thread which documented the issues with the Jolla browser (being redirected to a “browser too old”-page) among a couple of other threads and many messages in extant threads, IMO @teleshoes has chosen the right words:
- why on EARTH was DELETING posts+comments for at least one day (and maybe as much as FOUR DAYS) deemed a smaller inconvenience than temporarily breaking the website on a browser that is just barely usable as it is?
- if it was deliberate, y’all are just, like, bad at decisions.
I have the impression that patching the browser detection to still accept the current Jolla Browser was not seriously evaluated, maybe because it would have cost extra money.
But stating this in the way quoted below feels like a slap in the face and a bad joke for someone (e.g., me) who contributed to multiple threads, which do not exist any more, plus I “missed” to keep backups of all the posts in all threads at FSO (should have learnt from the last time I was confronted with that notion) 
:
P.S.: IMO it is better to omit “USA style” (i.e., meaningless) apologies in some situations. After taking actions like this, they feel like an extra kick in the buttocks.
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Seems like if one would want Discourse to take a backup more than once a day it must be configured manually.
Damned if you do, damned if you don`t…
“What, they did not apologize!!!”
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SaaS is very common; it isn’t a good or bad thing in itself. The use case must be considered, and I’m quite fine with the forum not being self-hosted at Jolla HQ This is a public forum, after all. If there is some soft of fully automatic flagging system, I’m not a fan of it at all… Discussions on this forum have been very much on topic after all AFAIK. TJC reacting to the third flag sounds quite good approach, as the reaction is “automatic” but only after users’ actions, not autonomously.
The rollback could explain why the backup was lost, too, if the backup was on the same server… Need I say more? 
I hope Jolla updates the browser engine again soon, so the forum update won’t have to be postponed too long!
Edit: Managing forum isn’t the core business of Jolla after all, so some amount of hiccups is both inevitable and acceptable. Losing four days of posts is knocking the limit, however… Let’s hope the next update goes smoother
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It would be, but that didn’t happen. We lost 30 hours of posts. Which is of course already too much.
Thanks for the correction. I just saw four days in a post and used it…
If it is not possible to separate the data from the code because it is all mixed up together in one ‘container’ (whatever that is) then this does not sound like a very good decision by the people who designed Discourser or how its implemented. This presumably means that you could never revert the code, or perhaps even a patch to the code, without reverting the data as well, and maybe vice versa?
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-
The forum software is called “Discourse” by “Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.”: https://www.discourse.org/
I.e., there is no concluding “r”. -
If it is not possible to separate the data from the code …
There sure is data- / code-separation, technically. But likely not contractually, as pointed out. Just an often occurring consequence of using SaaS.
You might take a look at the source code of Discourse at GitHub, to see how it is designed in detail.
Besides being offered commercially as SaaS, it is also Free Software (GPLv2) so anyone can run her / his / its own instance.
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yea, sorry. my ‘one-to-four days’ guess was just a guess at the time.
i was basing it on the VoLTE thread. at least 10 posts over at least 26 hours were lost there, and the most-recent remaining post was four days ago, so i knew it had to be “more than 1 day, and maybe as much as 4 days”.
No harm done! Thanks for clarification!
TBH, the VoLTE thread is quite noisy, so that was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make
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haha, exactly! id be willing to bet good money that olf would have complained worse if they hadnt said sorry.
devs make mistakes, especially when operating under conditions of pressure and partial information.
upgrading the forum without testing it on SFOS browser was an error, but not a big deal; virtually no one uses the SFOS browser as a daily driver when far more mature alternatives exist. (aliendalvik vivaldi/chrome/bromite, the native forum app, or breaking out a laptop). the browser could have been improved and hotfixed, with instructions to upgrade posted on the main forum landing page, etc etc.
deleting the comments instead of devising a better solution was, of course, a much more serious mistake, but that mistake was made in a stressful situation, with ONLY bad choices. the (unfortunately incorrect) decision was made without malice, and received a public apology.
though i DO still say that a “ATTN: POSTS+COMMENTS LOST” pinned post was the least that should have been done after so serious an error. (it STILL wouldnt go amiss, IMO. several of the posts i was commenting on during those days still dont exist again.)
While I do understand that some people have happily flagged this post, I believe it is obvious to you @808, that “it so clear that the Jolla team test absolut[e]ly nothing” is really far off and untrue. Thus please refrain from writing such nonsense publicly, especially not in Jolla’s own forum.
But you do have a point with the statement: “maybe we users are the QA team”
Although not “maybe”, you, I, we all are part of Jolla’s quality assurance team; this is one of the reasons why this forum exists: To channel bug reports and other feedback to Jolla.
(Another reason is to leverage users helping users in order to offload Jolla’s SailfishX support team.)
Thus my suggestion is to accept your role (resistance is futile, any way) and play it responsibly. 
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LOL: Making decisions and taking action deliberately (here: deleting 30 hours of forum interactions) and then stating the classic phrase “We apologize for the inconvenience.” for me is a way of saying: “We could not care less.”
While I do not know if sailors, specifically Ville, are aware of that, be assured that anglo-american companies mean that, when they say or write that. It might be a introductory statement to chop your head off right after that. 
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Don’t take us too important. You are so unfriendly.
(I’ll kick out all those negative forists in a heartbeat, go buy Android, go buy iPhone! Do you think these companies would give a shit about you? So please behave better! It’s frustrating every (few) times I visit here to read so much negativity 
)
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Any chance we could get a blog post with a postmortem?
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Thanks for telling me what you think I know but mate… look at the state of this os today…look around you. People are not making up lies…people have real issues.
Some say roll back and try a reinstall…thats a scary prospect.
Also what better place to call out bad software then at the source.
Look…II hearhear more from users when iyt come to help then I do Jolla… let me guess…our issues areare not important enough to address with some patches…If we are the QA team where is the reward for our effortsefforts?(see what my phone did there… thats poor QA friend)
In Jolla’s 2022 vision statement the talk about nothing we their users have asked about oror reported… so again… why shouldn’t we criticize these people???
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