A scheduled database upgrade took a turn for the worse for the Yahoo Answers team, but the group valiantly overcame the problem and returned the site to working order.
Every so often I’m reminded why writing about technology issues is a lot more fun and much less stressful than dealing with the darned things myself.
The rapidly growing Yahoo Answers website quickly became too blessed with an abundance of user generated content. Their database needed a little R&R, probably for some quality table resizing, so the Answers support team scheduled some downtime for the weekend.
At some point, Mr. Murphy stopped by for a visit. All system administrators know Mr. Murphy, even if their name for Murphy’s Luck is a string of unprintable expletives. Mr. Murphy especially loves to visit with admins on weekends, which is why your sysadmin flatly refuses your request to kickstart a new website at 4 pm on a Friday afternoon.
The Yahoo crew took a chance with their plan to take Answers offline on Sunday, work their database wizardry, and have everything ready to go by Monday morning.
Right now some sysadmin is shaking her head while sipping a cold one; she knows what’s coming next, and probably lots of other readers have figured that out. Let’s look at the blog entry from the Yahoo Answers crew:
>>The database downtime started a little later than we planned (started at 2pm California, USA time (GMT 22:00)) We plan to be back up by 11am California time (GMT19:00 Monday). >UGGGH. Some last minute “hiccups” is delaying our resurrection from the downtime. Currently, we are planning to come back up by 2pm California time (GMT 22:00 Monday). Sorry guys. Don’t know what else to say.
They have overcome whatever obstacle was in the way, and Answers has relaunched with some new features:
Tabbed View of Questions You’ll see that you can now see the 20 most recent questions on the front page and category browse view for Open, Resolved and Undecided questions with tabs on the top to navigate from one set of questions to another. We’ve also redesigned the way you move from page to page.
Country Content Filter Another cool feature we added is the country content filter. A lot of you asked for the ability to hone-in on questions specifically from your market. Now you can toggle between questions and content from all English-speaking markets or just focus on questions that were posted on your own Answers site!
Best Answer Bug Fixed
The Best Answers % on the MyQ&A page has been fixed.
Congratulations to them for sorting out the database.
—
Tag:
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok: 
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
