“Glitches” seems like an easy catch-phrase to explain encountered problems in the world of technology; but “glitches” doesn’t reconcile the real human frustration people encounter when they engage with a system that is experiencing a rather unique challenge.
I won’t say we are experiencing a glitch…. CTH 2.0 is experiencing a challenge that has actual emotional consequences… Here’s the issue in as much non-technical wording as I can muster.
SIDEBAR: For other websites with considerable scale, and considering the deplatforming issue underway, this might also serve as a guide. Additionally, for site users in any website this might explain some background decision-making on commenting functions that is often left unsaid outside of closed-door meetings.
First, my sincere apologies for the trouble everyone had, and is having, as we launched CTH 2.0 with new host servers. As you know, our commenting community is our #1 priority and we have years of relationship and trust together. The challenge before us today is considerable.
When we were told we had to leave WordPress/Automattic platform it was important to us to retain the entire site library that includes over 56,000 published articles and over 7.2 million comments.
Some articles carry up to several hundred citations and the average amount of content within the 7.2 million comment file alone exceeds 40 million lines of metadata.
All of that CTH data took approximately 60 hours to export and transfer (import) to a new site and eventually new host servers. The data was first uploaded to a test site to gauge the scale of data and time. After that initial transfer timeline was determined the data was then imported to new host servers, CTH and CTH 2.0 were mirrored, and fully migrated away from WordPress/Automattic servers.
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