Good gracious, it's almost over. The engineering team here at CBSi plans to launch the 100% rebuild and redesign of Giant Bomb on February 12, 2013. That's Tuesday, one week from today. Despite an intimidating bug queue still in front of the team, Danny Chi (pictured), our lead engineer, gave me the nod to prep you guys that we're near the end. In my usual "bullet points are awesome" way, here are some things you should know.
- On the night of Sunday, February 10, we will take a final snapshot from the live database. Any additions made from that point till the launch will likely not make it to the new site.
- Also on February 10, I'll be pushing code to the live website that disables billing management and various login/password areas of the site so that users can't make changes that would cause them problems.
- Subscription renewal during this dead period will not be processed. When the new site goes up, we will turn our nightly processing back on once we're stable on the new platform. There will be no interruption to your features during this time.
- Because all of our RSS feeds were rebuilt, your readers / podcast managers will likely freak out initially, and then quickly return to a normal, regularly updating state.
- Along with everything else, we are changing our video hosting provider. This should fix a lot of the slowness people have witnessed with our videos in the past six months. We'll be testing this on the beta site in a couple days.
- Comic Vine's launch will follow a few weeks later. To keep members of both sites in sync, we'll be shutting down signup and password changes on that site till they're out.
If you haven't done so already, I highly suggest jumping over to the beta site at some point this week and trying the site out. We recently opened it up to all registered users (as long as you signed up before Thanksgiving of 2012). This also means that if you changed your password since Thanksgiving, you'll want to use your old password to check in on the beta. Everything will get updated once we do the final migration next week. However, if you are having trouble logging into the beta, please send and a Private Message (on this site) with the following information.
- Your Giant Bomb user name.
- Your email address.
- If you're a user from the old days do you have a central username that is different than your giant bomb username?
- Is there anything odd about your password (foreign characters, abnormally long...etc) that you think might be causing a problem?
- Are you using Facebook to login?
Thanks for your patience during the past year, as we've taken the time to set up the new site. There were a lot of ways this whole experience could have gone bad, both within the community and within our own team here. I'd like to think we did a pretty decent job of keeping you guys informed and a part of the process along the way, and we won't run into the "why did they change it" feedback that normally comes with site changes of this size. It's been a fun ride. Hopefully, it'll also be a smooth one, and I'll be drunk and celebrating with all the engineers next week! More likely we'll all be in a panic making fixes, but I'm gonna stick to that fantasy, as always.
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