I'm going to disagree with the idea that it's taking longer than standard simply because I can think of a few very reasonable scenarios where a week's work would be required.
Migration = quick
Upgrade = hours
Rebuild/re-organize = slow
Upgrade + Rebuild + Migrate (and thus sort) = ?????!
It doesn't matter what you throw into the mix, the down time should be minutes, maybe an hour or two at most. Here's why. As is typical for Web work, you operate with two systems -- a staging system, and a production system. If you're doing things right, you mirror the production server, then do all that long & difficult work
on the copy, then press a button to tell the DNS to point at the new server instead of the old. If you do it this way,
it doesn't matter how difficult the task, the customer only sees minutes of down time.
Probably Morrus doesn't even know this, but
even En World has a staging system -- an old dilapidated one that I found while volunteering to help with the slowdowns, but it's there nonetheless. Even a non-business site run by volunteers seems to follow this concept. It really is an industry standard, and if you follow it, there is absolutely
no reason that anyone can put forward that would cause down time like this. The data is hard to migrate? So what? Do it on the secret copy, take your time, and roll it out when ready. There is a hardware migration from Windows to Linux? So what? Do it on the side, and roll it out when ready. And so on.
That is why some of the people in this thread can be so certain even when they do not know the circumstances. The truth is, no matter what the circumstances, those guys (and me too, frankly) could bid on such a project and guarantee down time measured in minutes or hours, not days or weeks.
Now, having said that, obviously there
is down time, so something isn't following the industry standard. It
could be incompetence, and it shouldn't be so awful to float it as a possiblity. When I first started in the Web back in 1994, my first few sites were "live" with no mirrors or backups or anything. If I wanted to make a change, I did it right there on the production site, and if things broke, the whole world saw it. It's not mean or terrible to say I was incompetent back then, it's simply a fact. So it may just be a fact of life that WotC has a lot of junior Web guys who don't have a lot of experience. That's not mean, it's just a truthful possibility.
However, my personal guess is more in line with what others have said -- budget. It may well be that the management heard about setting up a mirror of the production site and said, "Screw that, it's just some stupid forums!" If so, that
totally explains things but it's also a choice that can now be judged by outsiders, for better or worse.
My concern is that if that really is the case, then it's really, really, dangerous. When management makes a decision like that, it's up to the developers to say, "OK, we'll follow your leadership, but you need to understand that working directly on the production site opens it up to severe hacking." And that's the problem. If they roll out bits of code here or there (right now, apparently doing a migration of the usernames), some nefarious type can don his black sombrero, and start picking away at those bits of code that get rolled out (and possibly rolled back if they're untested). Any time you put code onto production directly and then have to undo it or roll it back (any time it's generally untested first) you run the risk of there being a big hole in it for some mean person to drive a hack through.
For the next two weeks, they're basically going to have to withstand an onslaught of probes, hacks, and so forth. That sucks.
Of course, if they're not operating on production directly, then no problem, but then we come right back to there being no reason for the down time. Whatever they're doing should have been done on the side and then launched when ready.
Please, don't misconstrue
any of this post as a "dancing on the grave of WotC" type thing. I'm really just trying to explain why, technically, there really isn't cause for such down time. I still like WotC, still play D&D, and will happily use their new forums.
