We're back! But you may experience some temporary issues -- here's what you need to know right now

The update has been completed and we are pleased with how everything has gone so far. HOWEVER -- there is now going to be a brief period of time where pages may be slow to load, or you may experience errors. We are aware of this, and it is completely expected. We anticipate that these issues will quickly clear up as more people come back to the site.

The two errors that you may run into temporarily are these:

1) 504 Gateway Timeout. This means that our server received your request to visit a page, but could not respond quickly enough. This could happen anywhere on the site, including while posting -- temporarily, we recommend copying the text of your post to another location before hitting the Post or Preview button, just in case.

We expect this error to be temporary and fairly non-intrusive. If you run into this error, you should only experience it once on that page -- if you see it, wait a minute or two, and then try reloading the page. Note that if this happens when you are trying to post, you should probably go back to the forum you were in and start the posting process again, to avoid potentially double-posting.

If you see this error, it should clear up within no more than 10-15 minutes, and you should not see it again on that page. On subsequent visits to the page, you should see it load normally. You do NOT need to report this error, unless you are still unable to access the page you're trying to reach after more than 15 minutes.

2) Database query error. A database query error will appear on a blank page, and will look something like this:

Query failed: INSERT INTO jury_log VALUES (NULL, '101563', '1002', '18809580', '10', '1', '4', '184242', '', NOW() )

Note that this error may occur immediately after a 504 Gateway Timeout, in which case you should just wait a minute or two and then try again. But if you see an error like this appear immediately, without delay, then please copy the error message and report it in the DU Community Help forum.

We expect to see this error cropping up more frequently than the 504 error. If you experience 504 errors, they should clear up quickly on their own. But query errors require a manual fix, so we might be hunting them down for a little while.

We're not going to rule out that further work will be needed, depending on what happens next. But as of now, we expect that as more people come back to the site, these errors will diminish and disappear. We hope to be back to normal very soon.

If any of this changes, I will let you know. In the meantime, welcome back!