If you caught us during our down-time, welcome back, if you’ve just come on and don’t know what’s going on, then..hello!

Over the past few months we’ve been beta testing the new site code I’ve been talking about for yonks now. We went in to open beta a few weeks ago where we provided a test site for willing users to help us root out any bugs in the sites before we went live. I first of all want to say a big thank you to those of you who took time out of your internet schedules to help us beta test, your help was invaluable and we’ve squashed lots of bugs. Many more people did this than I thought, so it was great to get some support from you. Thanks again.

So we’re now in a transition state from old code to new code, where we need to swap out all the old stuff and replace it with our brand-spanking new stuff. We’re doing this on a per-site basis and I needed to pick a first site that has enough traffic on it to be a good test of things, but not too much traffic that I risk bringing down entire servers because of one or two bugs. I’ve picked Fallout 3 Nexus because it fits this criteria, and the Fallout community has always been very good with helping to report any issues with the site, so I’m hoping that can continue!

If you’re reading this then you’re on the new, updated site. You’ll notice not much, if anything at all, has changed aesthetically. That was the plan all along and not the main focus of this initial stage. So if, when browsing around the site, everything works as usual and nothing seems out of place or odd then this transition process has been a success and we’ll breathe a sigh of relief before moving on to the next Nexus site to convert. If you come across errors, bugs, or things seemingly out of place then this is something we need to fix, and we can only do that if you let us know about it!

To that end we’ve setup a bug tracker on the forums for you to report any bugs you think you’ve found with the site. It uses your Nexus username and password so you don’t need to sign up or do anything different; it’s just like posting a new forum thread. The sooner you report them, the sooner we’ll fix the bugs! There’s 3 of us sitting around waiting for these bugs to come in to fix them, so they should get fixed very quickly.

This upgrade is the combination of over 10 months of work, and has been a huge project with every single line of code on the sites rewritten. I think it’s only logical to think that there are going to be a few teething issues during this process so please, have patience with us! We’ll fix things as fast as possible.

This conversion from old to new is the final stage of our upgrade process before we move on to adding some great new functionality to the Nexus sites. My hope is obviously that the code is as bug free as possible so we can get this conversion done as soon as possible and move on to the really fun stuff, but we’ll ensure we monitor the sites as much as possible to ensure they’re as good as before, and better, very soon.