It's that time of the month and we're upcoming with maintenance for the end of the month. So what does that mean? It means chat services get cut off in the early morning hours on the Eastern time zone while I do backups, disk cleanup, snapshots, and server restarts. I'll start giving out warnings via system broadcasts (shows in the room in yellow) closer to the time when it is to occur. When you start seeing the system broadcasts, you'll have about an hour to start wrapping things up before chat services come to an end. UG servers should still be available and active. Thank you all for your patience as I go through the necessary stuff but we'll be back up and going for March 1.

• WORK IN PROGRESS: New changes are upcoming. I'm putting the servers down tonight at 3am to finally cross them over to a secure connection (HTTPS). It's been long requested and I had my reservations because I did NOT want to break what is working without a way to fix it. That serves no purpose at all so I've researched and planned thoroughly a way to cross over to HTTPS from HTTP for the chat servers and tonight is the night. If all goes well, you'll see https:// instead of http:// and it works as it always has. If it fails, I've got contingencies to roll back to what worked and I'll go back to the drawing board. I don't know how long this will take so please be patient with the crossover. SOME old links may not work if they reference http:// and do not redirect to https:// which is also planned for a seamless transition. IMPORTANT, this is ONLY for the upstairs chat servers and the UG will be converted later. Fingers crossed folks!

  UPDATE (Mar 1, 2026 - 6:30am): Family issue came up overnight so I have had to postpone the HTTPS crossover until perhaps tomorrow night.

  UPDATE (Mar 2, 2026 - 12:00am): Alright we're on again for another maintenance to do this crossover, so more fingers, more crossing, let's go!

  UPDATE (Mar 2, 2026 - 9:00am): A LOT of lines of code to review in order for the chat servers to smoothly run over HTTPS so I'm still working on it.

  UPDATE (Mar 2, 2026 - 6:15pm): The upstairs chat servers are still down as I make the conversion and dig through everything. At present, HTTPS is established and now just working on session handling so it doesn't either drop your connection too soon or doesn't drop it at all and you end up with too many chat sessions.

  UPDATE (Mar 3, 2026 - 10:00am): The upstairs chat servers are still down asyou all are well aware and have been pinging me at the Support Desk about for a while now. I am aware and I am still working on smoothing things out. The secure chat servers over HTTPS was a must in this day and age and it needed to be done. I am working as fast as I can but there isn't any going back I'll keep you informed.

  UPDATE (Mar 3, 2026 - 12:00pm): I've not slept much. My eyes are crossing so I'm forced to put this down for a little bit and will refocus when I wake up. Trust me, I'm getting closer, just a lot of little details that have to be updated across multiple fronts.

  UPDATE (Mar 3, 2026 - 8:00pm): Well I'm back, I'm functional and still working on it. I'm going to give real facts here but I've been dealing with familial issues. I've two elderly parents to attend to so I've squeezed in as much Chatro work as I can in between while I can. I truly am sorry folks this hasn't just been a home run of a transition. I'm learning new things about this whole process and once it is completed, it'll be worth it as maybe then tumblr can return. I've been made aware that they are blocking non-secure sites like our chat servers so bringing us into the present from the last decade will be wondeful.

  UPDATE (Mar 4, 2026 - 12:45am): Alright, after a lot of debugging and tracing, I think I've finally got it to where it's stable and active. I'll be monitoring for the next 24-48 hours before I do an overnight maintenance to restart everything with everything put into place. If all goes well after after that, then I'm finally finished and the chat servers are officially working over a secure connection. Let me know any feedback as you see it. The hope is that nothing new pops up. Enjoy for now!

  UPDATE (Mar 4, 2026 - 8:45am):Well that was short lived. So while it is working, it is far from optimal so now comes the streamlining and that will be hit or miss. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, this will continue to take a bit more time and improvement. Stay tuned! (figuratively speaking.)

  UPDATE (Mar 4, 2026 - 10:45am):I hope you all are keeping tabs on this page because stoppign to answer a bunch of emails and support tickets I probably won't be doing until I have some sort of stability that I'm monitoring. In essence there may be progress before I ever answer via those methods. Stopping for now and will restart in a 3 or so hours (sleep).

  UPDATE (Mar 4, 2026 - 11:00am):Oh and I forgot, the Whochat pages will be down for the present time until the chat room stability returns. I've got to redo the Whochat mechanism which won't take long is on the low end of the totem pole right now. Alright, now sleepy time.

  UPDATE (Mar 4, 2026 - 4:15pm):So after working on various configurations, I've settled in on a few changes that will help. For now I'll monitor. I do know it's not "FIXED" but I'm waiting to see if we're closer. For now though I've reduced the roomlimit to 15 chatters maximum for the time being. I don't want a flood of users (say after work and coming in during prime time) to make things unstable and I can't tell if the instability is the backend or from the frontend users. There are tons of rooms that are vacant. Spread yourselves around for now. I promise this is only temporary. I'll deal with the whochat after this is finished.