Last night I got an email from Dreamhost notifying me that all day tomorrow, Wednesday October 7 starting at 10:00 AM Pacific time (that’s 5:00 PM UTC, I think) is a maintenance window for upgrading our databases to a new MySQL version.

The good news is that this means it will finally be possible to save and properly display emoji in submitted text.

The bad news is that there will be unspecified downtime during the day — they say no more than 10 minutes’ worth, but we all know how these things can go.

The weird news is that they’re asking everyone to limit database changes all day, citing “it will just prolong the migration” as the reason.

Obviously, the timing is impeccable, since we’re in hiatus at the moment. I personally think it will be fine to carry on as normal, but it might be a good idea to put off starting the next dynasty until Thursday, just in case.

I’m making backups of the site and databases tonight, naturally. Let me know in Slack if anything goes horribly wrong tomorrow.