Hey everyone, this seems like an obvious kind of topic but I don't know the answer and can't find it via forum searching SO:

When we get a notice about a newer software version, are we supposed to upgrade immediately?

I resisted upgrading when I had self-hosting because that always without fail caused massive technical problems that were always without fail a huge and time-consuming hassle to resolve, but now with hopefully less catastrophe-prone cloud hosting, that won't keep happening, I hope I hope I hope?

Or in other words, I kinda thought this would be automatic and non-optional with cloud, but it seems I have to choose to hit that upgrade button?

Why would I NOT want to do that?

I don't think I have any remaining active mods that might be incompatible anymore BUT . . . is it going to crash ANYWAY?

What if I hit that button and it immediately crashes? Is tech support going to fix that for me?

Would it be best to only do that first thing on a Monday morning so if it does, the crash hopefully won't drag through the weekend and on through the following week?

Clarification appreciated, thanks!

16 minutes ago, raincat said:

When we get a notice about a newer software version, are we supposed to upgrade immediately?

I resisted upgrading when I had self-hosting because that always without fail caused massive technical problems that were always without fail a huge and time-consuming hassle to resolve, but now with hopefully less catastrophe-prone cloud hosting, that won't keep happening, I hope I hope I hope?

Or in other words, I kinda thought this would be automatic and non-optional with cloud, but it seems I have to choose to hit that upgrade button?

Why would I NOT want to do that?

I don't think I have any remaining active mods that might be incompatible anymore BUT . . . is it going to crash ANYWAY?

All very good questions. In most scenarios, when there is a security vulnerability in the software, that is the number one time to upgrade immediately. Number 2 is when you're facing a bug which is impacting you. Outside of that... We like to leave this up to the owner/administrators to a degree. Obviously, at some point, the underlying technology will need to advance so on our Cloud, we do "nudge" our clients so to speak 😉.

One reason we try to put this in the owner/administrator hands are due to dependencies like third party applications/plugins, language packs, custom Pages templates, etc... These items still run on the backend code and could disrupt the community for updates which change these items which the dependencies rely on. Thus, we leave it up to the owner/administrators to decide when to upgrade and they are able to upgrade those components.

There also is always the bug risk/reward factor too. All software has bugs (even though we try to QA as much as possible to get rid of these in testing and beta phases), from a small one like us to giants like Microsoft and Apple. Upgrading to a new software release could potentially bring a bug in but it also fixes the bugs that are noted in our release notes. Thus, we let our community owners/administrators decide when is right to upgrade. Would hate to have a community running a huge competition that is dependent on polling and we force an upgrade that then introduces a bug in polls where it wasn't there prior. However, the reverse is also true, if you notice a bug while running a competition and we release a fix, you would want to upgrade that immediately.

30 minutes ago, raincat said:

What if I hit that button and it immediately crashes? Is tech support going to fix that for me?

If you have any issues with the upgrade, please submit a support ticket. We're here to help 😉.

30 minutes ago, raincat said:

Would it be best to only do that first thing on a Monday morning so if it does, the crash hopefully won't drag through the weekend and on through the following week?

We do have emergency 24/7 support for Cloud clients in the support ticket area. However, support over the weekend may be delayed. If it is important to you to get the most readily available support, I would suggest doing your upgrades during our regular business hours.