Expected DU downtime for maintenance: Thursday July 31, 1 PM ET (UPDATE)

Last edited Thu Jul 31, 2025, 02:32 PM - Edit history (2)

UPDATE: JULY 31, 2PM ET

Downtime is over for now, and we have completed the updates that we needed to complete.

HOWEVER...

Due to the nature of this update, there is a fairly high potential for glitches and odd things to happen. Most of these glitches, should they occur, will be related to caching. Essentially, "old" data and instructions might still be left behind, even though the update has been performed. It's possible -- depending on the seriousness of the glitches -- that we will have to take the site down again and revert the changes that we've made.

If you experience any "weirdness" of any kind, please report it to me via email (earlg@democraticunderground.com). Email is better than DU Mail, just in case DU Mail is affected. When reporting any bugs or glitches, please do your best to explain the problem as explicitly as possible -- use as much detail as you can.

If we need to bring the site down again, it's likely that we will not post an announcement first -- the site will just become unavailable and you'll get the "DU is currently offline for maintenance" message. If we need to provide you with additional information, we'll do so through that message. Should something go seriously wrong, we'll update our social media pages with information.

Otherwise, we're hopeful that everything went according to plan and further action won't be necessary. I'll update you again once we're confident that things are stable.

(Note that non-Star Members will not see ads temporarily. We will be performing a brief code update to bring them back tomorrow morning -- enjoy it while it lasts!)


ORIGINAL MESSAGE

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the late notice, but DU will be down for maintenance for a few hours on Thursday.

Over the past year or so DU has seen a significant increase in bot traffic -- particularly AI scrapers -- which don't produce any ad revenue but do significantly increase our server costs. This has been a real struggle for many independent websites, and an existential crisis for some. Tomorrow's downtime is part of an effort to mitigate that problem.

We will also be making a change to the way ads are loaded on DU, although this should not (if everything works correctly) make any difference to non-Star Members who are already seeing ads. It should provide a couple of fixes for Star Members -- for example, you should no longer see things like the random cookie banner which I know has been an annoyance for some people.

We do not know how much downtime will be required. We're thinking maybe 2-3 hours, although hopefully it will be quicker. If anything goes wrong -- which unfortunately is always a possibility when doing things like this -- we may need to revert the changes, which might mean additional downtime.

If we determine that the downtime is going to take significantly longer than expected, I'll update people by posting on our Facebook page and on our Bluesky page.

https://www.facebook.com/democraticunderground

https://bsky.app/profile/demunderground.bsky.social

I may also send an email out to our mailing list. If you are not already on the mailing list, you can join here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=contact

Finally, just to head off any questions about why we don't do this in the middle of the night, we've found that in the event we need tech support from any of the third parties involved in this process, we can get it much faster during regular business hours. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it's just better for us to do it this way. We hope the downtime will be brief and everything will be back to normal quickly.

Thanks for reading!

-- EG