The Distributed Proofreaders site is scheduled to be completely unavailable starting at 12 noon server time on Tuesday 19 May 2020 as we roll out Unicode support. The data conversion will take a while and we are estimating about 24 hours of downtime. During this time the main site will be down but the forums and the wiki will be available. If the data conversion and related checks are completed early, the site will return sooner.
Please consider using this maintenance window to do Smooth Reads that you have taken out prior to the downtime.
The code update requires logging out all volunteers. This means that you must save all of your work before we start the maintenance. Proofreading pages offline while the server is down and saving them when it comes back up will not work.
Thank you for your patience. As you wait for Distributed Proofreaders to become available again, please feel free to browse through the excellent articles in this Blog.
We’ll keep this blog post updated with progress during the outage. You can also find us on Facebook.
Note: Once the rollout has completed, there will be a brief forum and wiki outage as we restart the server.
Update 4:40pm EDT: Site is back up and operational. Thank you for your patience!
Update 3:00pm EDT: We are making good progress and hope to conclude soon. Once we complete our work, there will be a brief full-server outage (including the forums and wiki) as we restart the system.
Update 12:00pm EDT: Maintenance has started.