All of these websites are offline for an indefinite period of time. It could be weeks or months before they are all back online, or possibly never. It has become too much for one person to manage at this time. The only time available to work on these sites will be on the weekends in the wee hours of Fridays and Saturdays. Hopefully, eventually, things will get back online then.
The (few) sites that have other people helping to provide site administration will be the first to come back online (Other Minds Magazine and Spokane2600).
This outage also potentially impacts email, IRC, mailing lists, chat rooms, Internet radio streaming, etc.
The sites are intermittently on and offline as i try to fix them.
If you know Zope/Plone, or could help manually copying and pasting the old sites into the new, then please contact:
tolkienscholars@gmail.com
The following domains and all the subsites under these domains are affected:
The server software, Zope/Plone has become completely unmanageable for one person when trying to upgrade all these sites with so much content. Some of these sites have been running since the mid-1990's. All of these sites have been running on Zope/Plone since 2004. Unfortunately every effort to upgrade has lead to corrupting the websites, the site databases, and countless man hours lost trying to resolve the issues. Some have been resolveable on the smaller and simpler sites, but the larger sites have been crippled for years now trying to upgrade. The sites are now scattered across Plone versions 2.5.5, 3.3.6, and 4.1.3. The goal has been to try to get everything upgraded to just one version, but the software completely falls apart when trying to upgrade if any of the "wrong" add-on products are used. There should be a means to upgrade a site without peripheral products corrupting the core.
Hopefully, eventually, this will be resolved. It may be, as had to be done for most of the sites upgrading from 2.5 to 3.x of Plone, that manual copying and pasting of thousands of pages will have to be performed (export/import always leads to unpredictable results, and in-place upgrades also corrupt the sites). This could take ages for a single person to perform for so many sites, some with hundreds, even thousands of content items per site.
Since all of these sites are volunteer-based community website with ZERO funding all donated hosting, services, bandwidth, sweat and tears provided by yours truly, with a few other volunteers helping to run their own day to day operations, there are zero funds available to get any "professional" consultants to help clean up the mess, and far too little time available for me to delve in as deeply as would be appropriate if doing this for a living.
If you have Zope/Plone background and you are willing to help, many thousands of regsitered users will be immensely grateful for your help. Otherwise it is possible all these sites might just die this year.Zope / Plone needs a more robust upgrade path. It is getting better by leaps and bounds, but the answer always seems to be "don't use any products that are not bundled with the base install". Unfortunately without some of these products the sites do not provide much functionality, and they also become very vulnerable to security and spam issues lately, (though certainly immensely better than the php-based content management systems).
If there was something better, I would definitely now jump off the Zope/Plone ship, especially for something Java-based. But so far I have not found it to exist. So it will be either onward to cleaning out the corrupted ZODB's bit by bit, or quite possibly the end of all these sites, some more than 15 years old...