Hi all.
We’re having a small problem with Discourse, but it shouldn’t effect you much/at all. If you click on the “Categories” button, it’ll return an HTTP 500 error. This is happening because I deleted a category that Discourse relies on. I haven’t seen any issues with it other than the 500, but please feel free to reply to this subject if you do.
We’re working on a fix for this, it should be solved sometime tomorrow.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
We have largely resolved the issue. It stems from a bug/regression in Discourse as it pertains to the creation of categories. Until further notice, please ping me (@logan) if you need a category created, as some manual database modification needs to be done subsequently.
Again, apologies for the temporary inconvenience.
Why was the change not tested on Stage? Do we have one?
It would be nice to establish proper deployment and testing procedures, if we would like the rest of Mozilla to see Discourse as a reliable tool.
It wasn’t something that should have been tested on stage. Deleting a
category is something any admin can do, and I assumed that because it was
possible to delete this category, it wouldn’t have caused problems. As
Logan said, this may not have been the problem after all, though.
Got it!
That being said, can we fortify our case for using Discourse by implementing proper deployment techniques?
We are working on implementing a procedure for changes like this in the future. This was a very corner-case scenario, and the user-facing bug seemed to stem from something anyone with category-creating permissions can do, which is namely create a category. The blank page will likely return upon the creation of any category until we do an upgrade, so we are expediting that.