Scheduled Maintenance Alert

There is maintenance scheduled for this Sunday, July 5, starting at 10 PM EDT. We expect it to last for a couple hours. The logged in site will be unavailable during that time. Read on to learn more about why this is happening.

Reasons for Maintenance

This is the first time in VeriSky's history that the site is undergoing planned downtime. We normally release updates to the site a couple times a week without ever interrupting service. At our busiest we've pushed updates five or six times a day and no one has noticed. This is something we pride ourselves on, so why does the site have to go down this time?

The basic reason is this: we've outgrown our database architecture. When we originally designed the database schema we had certain use cases in mind. Every decision made sense at the time given what we knew. But now our users are on the site every day using it in ways we couldn't foresee. Our data looks different, our features are different, so our needs are different.

We would normally roll this out in smaller chunks, but in this case how the site fundamentally works is changing, and there's so much data that we cannot migrate it instantaneously. Once we knew there was going to be any downtime, we purposefully included every optional improvement that would've also required downtime, so all the changes would be consolidated into a single maintenance period. We believe that these updates will enable us to have a fast product capable of everything we want to do for long into the future.

If you have any questions about this process or want a more technical explanation of what's going on behind the scenes please feel free to contact us.

Other Recent Improvements

Finally, I want to highlight some changes that are already live that you might not have noticed:

• All logged in traffic is now encrypted. We previously allowed encryption on any page and only forced it on sensitive pages. Now in an effort to be more secure and ensure the privacy of the data in our system everything is encrypted once you log in, including the log in and registration processes themselves.
• Improved accessibility. In an effort to make the site more accessible we have added a "skip navigation" link and made it easier to move around the site without needing a mouse.
• Better support for time and date questions in surveys. Some older browsers didn't have baked-in support for these fields, so we're now manually supporting those cases ourselves. There are also better examples to help users answer these questions.
• Managers can now add and remove leaders. This minor change to how permissions work will help make sure only the users that should have access do.
• Managers can be assigned to all tasks at once. Previously managers could be assigned to all unassigned tasks at once. We've simplified that so managers can be assigned everywhere, regardless of the task's current state.