Release 3 (R3) Successfully Rolled Back From Production

Hi folks -- I just got done talking with Journals Product Manager Susan and I have some good news and some bad news about the R3 release, which went live this morning.

The good news is that the install was successful and everything was working post-launch: Buddy List Rostering, Blog About This Entry and the Notify AOL features all worked.

The bad news is that there was a problem with Buddy List Rostering that started breaking other products that use rostering (again, rostering is pretty much anything with a list that says certain people are allowed to do certain things, and other people aren't).

So, technically, Journals was okay, but the tech folks still had to roll back the R3 release in order to fix the problem -- see Susan's blog entry about the rollback.

They won't be able to try again until after the holidays, so sorry for the inconvenience.

Because of the nature of the problem, it could not have been detected in the beta or QA testing environments, so we only found out about it after it was installed to production.

Incidentally, the rollback, which happened a little after 3 PM ET and took about 10 minutes, was the reason you may have had some problems with your blog.  It should be better now.

So, here I was all set to say, "See? We can do a launch without any major problems!"; instead, now you're all like, "See? Told you so!"

Anyway, you can still play with the features in beta -- just add "beta." to the beginning of your blog's address (for example, http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke).

Thanks -- Joe