Forum System - ( discourse.org ) ( community.unsprawling.org )

Documentation Technology
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Open Source under GPL2 - for profit venture capital funded company - low-medium risk for longevity as there would likely be forks if the company turns sour.

Ran by @jakob22 on Digital Ocean

Multiple internal forum @admins

Digital Ocean - Backups, Etc.

Backups

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DigitalOcean Receipts
DigitalOcean Invoice 2024 Jul (37.6 KB)

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@jakob22’s debugging after Discourse crash/outage

1. Initial Problem Identification

  • Forum was stuck on loading screen after system updates, caused likely after update.
  • Docker container was running but site was inaccessible

2. Diagnostic Steps

  • Checked Docker container status: docker ps showed container was running
  • Examined container logs: docker logs app
  • Found database migration error related to the discourse-events plugin:
  • ERROR: null value in column “created_at” of relation “discourse_events_event_topics” violates not-null constraint

3. Root Cause Analysis

  • Recent system updates triggered a database migration
  • The Pavilion Events plugin had an incompatible migration that was failing
  • This failure prevented Discourse from starting properly

4. Solution Steps

5. Verification

  • Forum became accessible after rebuild
  • Container started without migration errors
  • All core functionality restored

The key lesson here is that plugin compatibility issues can cause system-wide failures during updates. In this case, removing the problematic plugin and doing a clean rebuild resolved the issue.