Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?
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it's a silly idea really, but this is just rediculous....
i mean who tests in production?!
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Test environments are for those who lack confidence in their own abilities
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@accalia It's just to maintain a controlled level of bugginess. After being exposed to Discourse for so long, we can't just jump back to a stable forum, it would cause decompression sickness.
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@accalia Sorry I proposed the idea first, and since the motto of this forum is "everything Blakeyrat says and thinks is stupid and wrong" I've forever spoiled the idea of having a staging server.
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@Luhmann said:
@accalia said:
who tests in production
Test environments are for the weak
aka Quitter Talk
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@blakeyrat said:
@accalia Sorry I proposed the idea first, and since the motto of this forum is "everything Blakeyrat says and thinks is stupid and wrong" I've forever spoiled the idea of having a staging server.
Also, I think it could be a good idea, which means that it is now Actually Hitlerโข. Sorry.
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This post is deleted!
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@blakeyrat did you try not calling them dumb or morons when suggesting it?
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if it's good enough for yahoo then it's good enough for us!
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@skotl said:
Test environments are for those who lack confidence in their own abilities
Just write code without bugs.
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@blakeyrat said:
"everything Blakeyrat says and thinks is stupid and wrong" .
Not everything, now that you said it
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@Lorne-Kates said:
@skotl said:
Test environments are for those who lack confidence in their own abilities
Just write code without bugs.
Exactly! why do you even write buggy code, just stop writing bugs
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"everything Blakeyrat says and thinks is stupid and wrong"
We're not that unreasonable. We don't think everything you think (or say) is stupid and wrong. Sometimes it's just stupid and sometimes it's just wrong. Although in all fairness, you're also right a good amount of the time, but usually in a stupid and/or wrong way.
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@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
Are you volunteering?
if needed.... yes
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Maintaining a test forum sounds like quite a lot of work. Are you thinking of keeping it up to date with production data, or manually reproducing bugs over there each time they are reported? Is everyone going to be able to take part in bikeshedding, or would we have to go over there to do it? What'sthe deployment process gonna look like?
I mean, the residents of this forum aren'texactly paragons, are you surethey really deserve that much of your (or whosever's) time?
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@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
I mean, the residents of this forum aren'texactly paragons, are you surethey really deserve that much of your (or whosever's) time?
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@mikehurley said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
We're not that unreasonable.
inb4 who is we?
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What? you guys don't like a little excitement on your forum lives?
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@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
Are you thinking of keeping it up to date with production data
if i run it that would make me a defacto admin (because of the database access.
I'm willing to do that if needed, but that's also firmly in the :do_not_want.avi: category. i don't want the drama of being admin or mod here.
so no, no prod data.
@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
manually reproducing bugs over there each time they are reported?
that would be a good test for the repro steps in the bug reports. You do plan on putting repro steps in the bug reports, no?
@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
Is everyone going to be able to take part in bikeshedding,
i see no reason why not., though i would hope the bikeshedding is minimized as much as possible. we're not here.
@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
What'sthe deployment process gonna look like?
deploy changes to the test forum. kick the tyres a fair bit, have a scheduled promotion to prod with a known maintenance window... yeah taht sounds about right
@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
I mean, the residents of this forum aren'texactly paragons,
@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
are you surethey really deserve that much of your (or whosever's) time?
it's my life and i'll waste it if i want to?
DAMNIT now that song is stuck in my head.
OUT! OUT OF MY HEAD YOU DAMNED TUNE!
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@Mikael_Svahnberg sure and we could eat rotten fish and perform bodily functions wherever we happen to be standing, because doing things properly just slows everyone down.
Just because testing can't catch every problem doesn't mean it isn't valuable: at the very least, having the issue appearing on the live site and not the test site would be evidence that it was due to the crawlers or whatever, and that the triage was justified. Think about it: if the forum was taken down by regular google bots, how much worse is it going to get taken down once wtf-bots start coming online.
I know you don'thave much real-world experience, but when you're providing a product or service that people actually want, those users will appreciate a bit of effort to make that service reliable in the first place, rather than this devil-may-care โwell it's online now, isn'tit?โ attitude. And having a streamlined testing and deployment process can actually provide better responsiveness than editing code files right on the production server like a php-monster, because developers can have the confidence to make changes without having to play whack-a-mole with regressions.
I might not agree that the effort to maintain this test system is worth the benefits, but for you to insinuate that there isn't any benefit to be derived at all (pardon the language accalia, but) that'sfucking crazytalk.
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@Buddy guess what:
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@accalia said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
OUT OF MY HEAD YOU DAMNED TUNE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S69I-YOWOU
You can thank me later.
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@Buddy so I've got some more time to write a more complete answer now. I do not ridicule the idea of testing. Test often, test a lot, and then test again. Hell, I've just spent a week trying to get our propaganda department to realise that it is a bad idea to swap to a new web site without first giving the concerned parties (we who are the alleged owners of the information on the web site) a chance to first review it and make sure the website works. Especially when there are just a few weeks left before the next cohort of high school kids are due to submit their university applications.
Do, by all means, set up proper test rigs that allow for regression testing. Get people to do exploratory testing, and then encode their findings into repeatable tests. Indeed, get a head start and write test cases as a means to validate your requirements engineering efforts, if you please.
What I wanted to glibly convey with my post was that orthogonal to any systematic testing efforts, issues do still arise. And when they do, more ...creative... problem solving techniques may be called for. Like what Ben did. Sometimes you strike gold at once, other times you may have to dig deeper. Like Ben did. Yelling at him and everyone else who is actively trying to find the root cause of the issue and solve the problem is not a constuctive way to facilitate getting the system back to a working state again. That was all. I am sorry that you read so much more into my post.
More long-term, we should probably keep discussing whether or not it is worth setting up a test forum in parallel to the real WTWTF. At the moment, I personally find the disturbances caused by keeping us at latest minimal, and I will gladly endure the minor hickups we've experienced so far because I know that a majority of the introduced changes will make is things better for me. But that's just my opinion: I am ok with being a live test site for NodeBB.
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@Mikael_Svahnberg I think you're only thinking of the efforts to keep the forum running that Ben's been undertaking. But he's also been adding plugins, removing plugins, adding them back in, et cetera, seemingly by the whims of random complainers. Those should be tested.
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I would say that it is hardly mission critical to anyone to keep it up and running 100% of the time.
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Those should be tested.
Agreed. I was living under the impression that they were tested before deployed, only perhaps not on a forum with 10+ years worth of contents and mumble mumble concurrent users.
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And in an unusually timely ironic twist, I was stuck with a blue tail-chasing tadpole over my username and had to close and reopen the tab in order to get back to reading the forums. But the die are cast; I'm still fine with it being a test site.
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@Yamikuronue said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
random complainers. Those should be tested
partially quoted for truth :D
Filed Under: that's all I had to cotribute
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@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
I'm still fine with it being a test site.
Im ok with it too, this site is just a distraction anyway. But if someone's first reaction to an unexplained failure is to comment out methods in live code, rather than to fall back to a previously working state, that's bad, imo, and I'm not going to call it good on account of anybody's feelings.
And if ben's changes haven'tbeen tested before deploying, that means he doesn't have any evidence that they didn't the cause the issue in the first place.
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@Buddy said:
if someone's first reaction to an unexplained failure is to comment out methods in live code, rather than to fall back to a previously working state, that's bad, imo
Well yeah. Sure; that would be great... the only problem is that we haven't been on NodeBB long enough to have the baseline "working state" to fall back upon when things start going badly.
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@Buddy said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
that means he doesn't have any evidence that they didn't the cause the issue in the first place.
Now I don't disagree with testing, but he does have relic, which can point out where we're spending the server time. So he had a good idea and tried to fix it immediately, I can't hate him for that.
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@Mikael_Svahnberg said in Maybe we should stop testing updates on the live forum?:
But the die are cast; I'm still fine with it being a test site.
What about testing live but with a notice. Something like a banner telling us which features are under test?