Our design update had so many issues, I’ve decided to revert. Our developer dropped the ball in the site conversion, and many things got broken in the process. Behind the scenes I was fighting multiple problems that you didn’t see, and there were plenty that you did. I’m sorry for that.
Our best laid plans blew up. A giant site with 18 years of content 35,000 posts and 5 million comments plus dozens of custom plugins to make things work the way we wanted aren’t an easy thing to migrate. So many things that have to be just right – and they weren’t
So, everything is back to the way it was on August 27th, when I made the full site backup.
Good news: Your old logins should work, and those of you that are subscribers should have your subscriptions restored.
Bad news: We are going to lose some some posts and comments on them. I can restore the posts, but comments aren’t possible. Again I’m sorry.
Please be patient as we rebuild content. I sincerely apologize for the trouble our visitors and subscribers have had. We certainly didn’t expect this to happen.
My admins and I need to take a break as this has been nearly a 24/7 nightmare since Wednesday Sept 10th. We just want to let things settle for a day or two.
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Good, now leave it like this.
All that effort unrewarded, a real bummer.
Onwards and upwards!
Website design that is more than just a pretty face is a complex piece of engineering. And unfortunately most ‘web developers’ are not up to it.
You need a software engineer and probably a database designer.
Perhaps it was too ambitious an objective to migrate everything. Maybe the solution is to archive most of it and triage. How valuable, really, are discussion threads from years ago?
The really valuable thing is the recent news items and the posts going forwards.
The other thing I would suggest, again, is look carefully at the ad experience. When you move from post to comments, you go through page after page of this truly dreadful trashy stuff, and for visitors it really devalues the site to be associated with it.
If I were a casual visitor, once through that lot would be my last visit. Ads are fine and necessary, sometimes even informative, but not ads like these, they come over like an insult to one’s intelligence and sensibility..
I know many will say subscribers don’t see them. That isn’t the point. Its what it does to the new visitor experience, and its what turning off new visitors does to the site’s position.
I have an ad blocker, and I never see them. My son wrote this instruction for me: Search for “uBlock Origin” from your browser’s extension store.
I recently went to a website, and there was first displayed: Turn off ad blocker. I quickly left the website.
Thanks for supporting WUWT
The first site I go to in the morning is wuwt to check on the latest info on “global waring and climate change”. During my waking hours, I am frequently checking for new articles.
A unique feature of wuwt is the ability to easily post an image. Check out the home page for the late John L. Daly’s website: “Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at:
http://www.john-daly.com. You should consider adding the URL to the Book Marks list.
Another useful feature of WUWT is the ability to make corrections to or add additional info to a comment after it has been posted. Most people don’t know they have a five minute window for making corrections after posting a comment.
BTW: The present format for wuwt works just fine for me, and there is no need to change it. As the old timers say:
If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.
PS: If you click on the image, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to comment text.
From the late John Daly’s website, is a chart (See below) showing plots of annual average temperatures at the famous Furnace Creek weather station in the remote Death Valley from 1922 to 2001. In 1922 the concentration of CO2 in dry air was 303 ppmv (0.59 g CO2/cu. m) and by 2001, it had increased to 371 ppmv (0.73 g CO2/ cu. m.), but there was no corresponding increase in the air temperature at this arid desert. The reason is that there is too little CO2 in the air to absorb enough out-going longwave IR light to case heating of the air
This empirical temperature data falsifies the claims (i.e., lies) by the IPCC that CO2 causes global warming and is the control knob for climate change.
John Daly found over 200 weather stations that showed no warming up to 2002.
NB: From the home page of “Still Waiting For Greenhouse”, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on a region or country to access temperature data from over 200 weather stations which showed no warming up to 2002.
Yes, I am aware of ad-blockers. But this wasn’t my point. You can block the ads, and if they become really offensive on a site this may be a reasonable choice.. Though, if one can afford it, paid subscription is obviously better for the site.
But neither one really solves the problem with these particular ads.
My point was, and I’m glad Anthony responded as he did, that the issue isn’t personal annoyance. I suspect most regulars who can’t or don’t subscribe will just sigh and page through them, and it won’t deter them from continuing to visit or affect their view of the site’s credibility. And subscribers will not see them.
But the different point I was making is the damage offensive and intrusive low quality ads do to the experience for casual visitors and to the reputation of the site. The site needs casual visitors who become regulars, so it needs to remedy the ads its taking.
The site has to be funded somehow, and a combination of ads and subscriptions is probably the right way. Its just these particular ones….
I have an ad blocker that I use a lot. Before I subscribed, I had WUWT whitelisted so they would at least get a few pennies from my visits.
I get pop-up offers for financial management and infinite nudges to look what happened when some lady removed blue tattoos from all over her face. I consider clicking the ‘x’ the cost of freeloading.
We are planning on toning that down.
What were you trying to fix?
97% of readers blame this on climate change 😀
This old man always remembers: “Don’t fix what ain’t broke”.
For this old guy, the traditional quip is: If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.
My memory is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Many people want to help by introducing something ‘new and better’ to make your life easier..
My reply to that is:
Please stop helping me!
The “new and improved” advertising gimmick caters to the ADHA in modern society.
13 second attention span. Has to be new to keep getting attention.
What were the supposed benefits to switching over to the new ‘thing’?
It’s always hard to convert or upgrade when you’re working on live sites.
Anthony, no need to apologize. Plans never survive contact with the enemy, Murphy’s Law.
Been there, done that.
Personally, keeping threads is not important to me. If a post on an essay has especially pertinent information, I put it in my own bibliography. Essays being available would be nice, but if necessary keeping only those from some point in time, say 2015, would be acceptable.
To me, the advantage of this site is reading new essays about new information and see what other people think. New readers will probably not go back through a large amount of past information. New stuff is what is important.
Thanks for your work on this site. It IS IMPORTANT!
PS: I like this format better.
Anthony, I would like to offer my services to help with web/technical work on the site – I have a good amount of experience in the field of web development, both front-end and back-end. I know I’m not a big name around here but I have been around a LONG time and have always appreciated the work you do.
Just a bit of background – I have experience architecting and implementing large-scale HA systems, including the largest white-label news app providers in the country (we supported apps for over 200 news stations on our system simultaneously)
Thank you. Do you know anything about WordPress?
I’m not an expert in WordPress but I run a few sites on it currently and I have worked on many client’s WP sites too. And I am definitely very capable with PHP which it’s built on (>20 years experience). Also database management.
Computers are an ass pain. Best of luck. Many thanks for all your hard work.
I did try and give you a heads up with my comment that the IT industry just doesn’t seem to understand the reasons for commissioning. sorry you’ve had o go through all of this effort, I don’t mind the site as it was.
For me its facts over form.
I used to be the IT department for my company. Had a mistake in trying to migrate an email server, couldn’t convince the busiest group that our email problems were self-inflicted. Ownership changed, new IT guy comes in, and starts us on the road to a unified system. So far, it’s a year and a half past due, with no signs of completion. It’s not my problem this time, but l’m starting to notice that most software “experts” seem to have taken the 100 series on the software, but are nowhere near experts.
I sold (money was better selling than chemical engineering) software applications through much of my career. I had the opportunity to meet and actually work for some of the small proportion of “developers” who knew what they were doing.
Most are posers.
Your rest is well earned. I know the pain that can be involved in data migration. Mine data was a tiny fraction of your sites but losing data is losing data ugh. We thank you for the years of providing so much great information and the place to share ideas.
“new and improved” almost never is
At the risk of getting shot for asking the obvious stupid question that you guys have already wrestled with….
Did you consider simply standing up a new site under the new format while shutting off all updates / comments to the old site after some future date? New site lives. All the old stuff becomes an archive. Best of all, you don’t have to migrate doodly squat.
Whatever happens, good luck. Migrations / upgrades suck. OTOH, the new stuff generally works pretty well, especially if you don’t have to drag terrabytes of old stuff into the Brave New World with you. Cheers –
Having spent ten years of my four decades in the nuclear industry programming databases and managing IT projects of one kind or another, most every one of our applications had to directly mix terrabytes of legacy data with the very latest incoming data, doing so on a real-time basis.
Doing this kind of thing requires that you have a SQL database tuning expert at your beck and call.
We sometimes found it necessary to join data from forty tables or more into a single result set. Some of these tables had millions of rows. For some complex data queries being done on a daily basis, indexing of tables wasn’t enough to prevent a SQL query from initiating a full table scan involving massive cartesian joins.
To prevent these complex queries from bringing the server to its knees, it became necessary to go beyond table indexing into the approach of pre-joining portions of the data into a set of auxiliary reporting tables which were structured, indexed, and optimized to fit the needs of those very complex reports.
Yes, doing this kind of thing costs lots of money. On the other hand, because it is nuclear, we know how to spend lots of money.
I spent a good bit of time with DB tuning, MySQL specifically. Sometimes, the approach that works isn’t the historically “correct” approach – you need to be able to understand the queries and interrelationships well enough to determine what to do “wrong”.
Mr. Anthony Watts: I’m glad you have great backup copies !!
One of your completers, host website up and erased all his data, because they thought his data was bogus. No apology, no mercy.
I’m sorry you are out tons of cash.
Been there; done that. It’s much worse when failed upgrades include hardware swaps.
I’m not getting emails about posts anymore. I figured just resubscribing should fix that, but when I try, I never get the confirmation email.
Nevermind – there was filtering set that I wasn’t seeing. PEBCAK…
Back on August 29th, after WUWT had gone down for its major restructuring on August 27th, I had predicted over on Jo Nova that a week or more would pass before WUWT was back up again and running smoothly.
Having done something similar myself in the early 2000’s on a similar scale, and with the assistance of a three-person team before and after, I have an appreciation of what is involved because ten years of my four decades in nuclear were spent in IT positions managing and programming databases of one kind or another.
To get our conversion project started, we first built a test area where we would revise all the client side programs, all the SQL Server database structures, and all the server-side stored procedures.
What we discovered when we began the initial software/database revisions was that over a period of seven years, the application had grown so large and so complicated that we ourselves didn’t fully understand how it worked and what all was inside of it.
System documentation hadn’t kept up with the numbers and the scopes of previous upgrades and previous system revisions. So we took time out to document every nook and cranny of the legacy system before we proceeded further.
After the software and structural revisions were complete in the test area — and after the system documentation had been fully revised to fit the newest version of the system — we then wrote a series of one-time specialized scripts and programs to dump the data out of the old SQL Server tables into the new, making appropriate data definition revisions as needed.
The whole conversion project took the three-person team about three months. The end-to-end conversion process final run was designed to be done in the space of about six hours real time. But before we did the final production run conversion, we had already done four or five test runs to be sure the entire process worked reliably from beginning to end.
Each of those test runs revealed bugs in the conversion process which had to be addressed. Other bugs were found in the client side software and in the SQL Server stored procedures which had to be addressed before the final conversion run. The final conversion run itself went off without a hitch. The revised application came back up with no bugs that were of any consequence.
The biggest problem we faced afterwards was that some in the user community didn’t like parts of the revised system.
Our response was that they had been informed of the upcoming changes months before, they had been shown what the revised system would look like, and that they hadn’t spoken up when given the opportunity to do so.
However, most all of the skeptics in the user community came around eventually. Not that they had any real choice in the matter.
Whether it’s the “old” or “new” format, I’m just glad WUWT is still up!
Not a surprise you had problems. Lots of these migrations are difficult and not well executed. As others have expressed, the data volume and application complexity is often seriously misunderstood.
When I was working, the hard conversion problems were done at a speed around a million pages a minute, with about 2 billion binding decisions made per second. Very, very high data volumes. This is not the sort of thing a “web developer” can even envision, never mind actually do.
My take is you need serious compute power to these sort of conversions, and the conversion needs to be done repeatedly to be sure it can be done reliably. There need to be detailed acceptance tests along with general requirements. This is the hard part. These days you can order a mid range server off the shelf and get it in a few days. Sure, it will cost as much as a nice new car, but it can handle multiple conversion tests.
Also, as mentioned in earlier email, especially for static older pages, switch to Zstd compression and squeeze the crap out of all the old static data. Using JPEG and zlib, and even brotli and png, is obsolete. It costs you more money and slows things down for everybody. Switch all live content to zstd, and especially recompress all static data. ( I am looking at you Google — stop sending out poorly compressed WOFF font objects!) Only serve ads that properly compress their content. This site gets an “F” on that one. If you are going to sent out giant javascript blobs, (again this site gets an “F”) be sure to use zstd to *fully* compress them.
Ping me if you need a recommendation on mid-range servers.
Yup, this happens. At least it’s working. Check this out for madness:
https://www.joannenova.com.au/2025/09/minister-bowen-says-costs-of-inaction-absolutely-definitely-higher-even-though-we-dont-know-the-cost-of-doing-something/