Hi everyone!

We've been communicating with our website developer and we are planning on having website updates implemented early December, specifically some time on December 4th (PST time). The website code updates in theory should not take long. However, since there will be quite a few updates coming, we'll need some time to configure any new features on the site and make sure our documentation follows alongside the update.

Assuming that everything goes smoothly, we're hoping that the configuration and guideline updates will be completed quickly. We don't want to promise an exact number of days that the site will be in sort of a maintenance-mode state at this point in time, but we'll be planning accordingly. We're aiming for a pretty quiet month in December in general. We hope the most exciting thing in December ends up being the website updates. Hopefully, that will also give the team some time to rest and time to look over new moderator applications afterwards.

With these updates to the site, we want to take some extra measures to ensure that there isn't anything submitted too close to when the code changes are implemented. We'll be closing a lot of the site's features a few days before the 4th. Please see the timeline below for what systems will be closing, so that you can plan any submissions in advance! We have full intent to re-open everything once we're sure updates are complete, configured, and guides are updated as needed. We'll also be addressing what will happen relative to December's prompt lower down in this new post!

December Website Update Timeline

• December 1st (at 11:59pm PST): New design approval submissions, new claim submissions, and new prompt/act submissions will close.
  • We ask that any existing design approvals not be edited/re-submitted after this date until we publicly confirm that site updates are done!
  • The moderator team will still be doing design approvals and prompt/act/claim reviews up until 11:59pm PST on December 3rd. If you receive feedback on an existing design approval, please do not resubmit that design to the queue or update anything.
  • We cannot guarantee feedback by this date, as this is mostly just to let people know if you have not heard from us on the 3rd or earlier, your feedback will be sent after site updates are complete!
• December 2nd (at 11:59pm PST): Design transfers/trades soft-close on the website.
  
  • We cannot hard-close design transfers/trades. However, we're going to request that no one submits any design transfers/trades after this time until site updates are done!
  • Any design transfers/trades submitted before this time will be reviewed and approved on December 3rd PST time.
• December 3rd: As stated above, December 3rd is going to be sort of a buffer day to give Moderators time to push anything through that they can before we halt to give some breathing room for updates coming on the 4th.
• December 4th: The site code updates will be moved to the live site and the site will go into maintenance-mode. We're reserving this day entirely so that code can be moved up at any time. There will be no precise set time when the site is put into maintenance mode.
  • While the site is in maintenance-mode, it will largely be inaccessible to the general public. Moderators will be able to login and configure aspects of the site as needed.
  • This time will also be spent resolving any bugs that might have cropped up during testing but might appear in the live site environment.
• December 5th-12th: We're going to loosely say this is sort of a tentative maintenance period. We're not sure how long configuration will take on the moderator side. We may re-open well before the 12th. We'll look into doing some sort of update on how things are going during this week.
  • If we come across a bug or concern, we'll seek help from our website developer. For the most part, we expect this time will have less to do with code and more to do with making sure if something has changed, documentation and settings are right.

We're predicting that site updates will go smoothly. On the odd chance updates don't go smoothly, we want as little movement as possible on the site and few to no changes. That way if we have to rollback any data, any impact will be minimal and well past when anything new was submitted. That's what the buffer day is for!

December's Prompt

December's prompt will go live when the website updates are done and the website is once again accessible to the general public. We will end December's prompt a month later from the date it opens.

The same will go for Monthly Regular prompts for December. If you want to get started on Monthly Regular prompts while the site is undergoing maintenance, go for it! You just won't be able to submit those prompts until the site is accessible again.

Monthly Regular prompts will end at the same time the regular prompt for December does, but you will see some overlap with January. This means we'll probably have at least a week where if we see a MR-001 or MR-002 prompt come in two times, the first MR-001 prompt will be assumed to be for December and the other M-001 prompt will be assumed to be for January. We'll be very transparent about prompt deadlines once December's prompt is able to go live!

The Event Raffles

We'll be rolling raffles on the 5th as planned, and we'll be following up with event prize winners around then too. Any masterlist grants or updates for the prizes will need to wait until after site updates are done! We hope everyone understands. While this update should not impede prizes being drawn, the website update will likely impact those prizes being granted to accounts and elnin on site. Everything else for the event aside from the raffles should, for the most part, be wrapped up by the 1st of December if not earlier.