Attention DD members! As you hopefully have noticed, there has been a Preview site running for the new version of Drunk Duck (The Duck) for about a month or so now. Everyone has been invited to make accounts, play around and report bugs, features and issues.

We have just learned that the Preview site will become the LIVE site this week - the projected day is WEDNESDAY.

WHAT THIS MEANS:

Upon changeover, the preview site will become THE site- the old DD will NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE. (We assume there will be some downtime as data is migrated over.)


WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR:

- All data CURRENTLY on the preview site will be wiped in preparation to accept migrated data

- The programmers are continuing to build functionality into the preview site but many features will not exist until some time after the changeover

- We've been told that part of the changeover migration involves converting as many images as possible on DD into PNG files (as a space-saving measure) which should NOT affect the visual quality of your images. However we do not know what that means for animated gifs, swfs, etc. (and we have some doubt as to whether .png would actually reduce filesize). We don't know yet if this will succeed as proposed or what issues may arise, but we felt it was fair to warn you (in case you want to make backups, double-check certain pages after the changeover, etc.).


WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:

- Your user data and comics SHOULD be ported over automatically (and in fact has begun already). However, I think we know that these things don't always go smoothly- if there's anything you want to back up, you should do it.

- We've been told that in the interest of time, ALL custom HTML is going to be ported over AS-IS (including the things which would not normally be allowed on the new site). If you've been meaning to update your custom HTML to include anything, DO IT NOW (as you may not be able to for some amount of time after the changeover).



Continue to report bugs and functionality issues on the preview/new site using the Feedback tab, as the programmers are to continue working on that site after the changeover. I suspect once everyone HAS to use the new site, a lot more reports are going to come in.


If you have been testing the preview site you know it is largely functional, but whether it is ready to become the main site is up for debate. We can tell you that Wowio is under some pressure to make the changeover happen and there has been a lot of discussion about this issue- but from what we have been told the changeover IS going to happen, despite issues of preparedness or functionality.