Site Announcements and Status - Recent Threads

Notice: Product Link Disruption in June 2026

cstanton — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:26:25 GMT

On the element14 Community we have embedded links and pop-ups for the online stores, Farnell, element14 and Newark.

During the following dates and times, due to maintenance on the online stores, this functionality may not operate, times are in UK timezones unless otherwise stated:

AMER – 3 days approx.

25/06/26 – 7pm EST to 29/06/26 – 7am EST

EMEA – 1 day

27/06/26 – 7pm to 28/06/26 – 6am

APAC – 1 day

27/06/26 – 4am to 28/06/26 – 3pm

Site maintenance: 26th May 2026 8AM-11AM UK Time

Dudley — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:50:09 GMT

Site maintenance will be happening on the morning of 26th May from 8AM until 11AM UK Time.
We will be doing a full site release of a new codebase.
The site will be fully unavailable while we do the release. You will be presented with a maintenance page or the Oops page for all pages during the duration of the release.
We expect the site to be available from around 11AM onwards.
We hope it will be earlier than 11am.

We'll be taking the site down at around 8am to apply the new version of our software. It will be down for about 2 hours and then we'll check everything and run our automated tests for an hour before we bring the site back online.

You can read more about what is in this release on the development blog Matt wrote up here: Site Maintenance 26th May :: Release 2026-3

element14 DevOps team

Site maintenance: 31st March 2026 8AM-11AM UK Time

Dudley — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:08:03 GMT

Site maintenance will be happening on the morning of 31st March from 8AM until 11AM UK Time.
We will be doing a full site release of a new codebase.
The site will be fully unavailable while we do the release. You will be presented with a maintenance page or the Oops page for all pages during the duration of the release.
We expect the site to be available from around 11AM onwards.
We hope it will be earlier than 11am.

You can read more about what is in this release on the development blog that Matt wrote up here: Site Maintenance 31st March :: Release 2026-2

element14 DevOps team

Resolved: "How Long have you been a member?" Achievement

cstanton — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:52:49 GMT

With the recent deployment of Showcasing your achievements - how long have you been a member? there is a known issue that affects the following:

- You may not see all members who have gained the appropriate year achievement

- You may not gain the '13 years' achievement, if appropriate to you

The development team are aware of the issue and they're working on a fix. There's presently no timeline for this fix, but any missed achievements can be manually awarded so long as we're made aware of it via 'Report a Problem' in Feedback and Support.

Site Maintenance: Search - 26th February 2026

sharathhp — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:53:36 GMT

Site maintenance happening from 04:00 UTC until 09:00 UTC 26th February 2026

We will be performing maintenance to our platform running search servers, while upgrading, search should be offline for about 20 minutes, but it might be as long as an hour.

While this is happening, the community site will be available, however some functions that rely on search may fail such as our recent content widgets.

Once all the work is complete, everything will return to normal.

We are upgrading our kubernetes cluster to the latest version along with search related components.

This will apply the latest security patches to our servers.

We thank you for your patience and understanding!

element14 DevOps team

Site maintenance: 3rd February 2026 8AM-11AM UK Time

Dudley — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:03:40 GMT

Site maintenance will be happening on the morning of 3rd February from 8AM until 11AM UK Time.
We will be doing a full site release of a new codebase.
The site will be fully unavailable while we do the release. You will be presented with a maintenance page or the Oops page for all pages during the duration of the release.
We expect the site to be available from around 11AM onwards.
We hope it will be earlier than 11am.

There's a lot of member facing changes this time around which we're really excited about. Matt has write up of the new features included in this release : Site Maintenance 3rd February :: Release 2026-1

element14 DevOps Team

Site maintenance: 2nd December 2025 8AM-11AM UK Time

Dudley — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:31:08 GMT

Site maintenance will be happening on the morning of 2nd December from 8AM until 11AM UK Time.
We will be doing a full site release of a new codebase. This includes the 12.1.9 version of Verint, the platform we run on.
The site will be fully unavailable while we do the release. You will be presented with a maintenance page or the Oops page for all pages during the duration of the release.
We expect the site to be available from around 11AM onwards.
We hope it will be earlier than 11am.
Following the release, we will need to perform a search reindex (again!), that will run for around 12 hours and may affect some widgets and functions within the site.

We'll be taking the site down at around 8am to apply the new version of our software with all the latest gizmos.

Matt has write up of the new features included in this release : Upcoming Site Maintenance 2nd December :: Release 2025-3

See you on the other side 🙂

element14 DevOps Team

Site Maintenance: Search - 27th November 2025

Dudley — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:22:56 GMT

Site maintenance happening 03:30 UTC until 13:00 UTC 27th November 2025
We will be performing maintenance to our search servers which will be offline for the duration
While this is happening, the community site should be mostly available, however some widgets may not work correctly, recently created content will not appear in tabbed content widgets, and some functions that rely on search may fail. This should mostly be restricted to registered users, guest users will be mostly unaffected as they will be served stale search results from cache.
We expect most of our work to be completed early in the release window.
Once all the work is complete, everything will return to normal without intervention from us.
More details below

We did some maintenance previously to replace our search servers. Now they are running in the live environment, we are finding they are overpowered compared to what they need to be. We're going to be replacing these with smaller boxes that are just as effective and cheaper to run.

Once the servers are in place, we will then need to rebuild our indexes. This usually takes around 12 hours.

While this runs, we are intending to have a limited cache on some of the widgets that rely on search to populate, such as the tabbed widget that lives on the front page. However, this will not work for all tabs.

Should you create new content, it won't appear in those widgets until the search reindex is completed.

We apologize for any problems this may cause you.

element14 DevOps team

Why you might see our Oops page

Dudley — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:46:16 GMT

You may occasionally run into what we call the Oops page:

This page appears for a few reasons:

Access restrictions: If you are trying to view something you are not allowed to, such as a private document. First, check whether you see the Oops page on the homepage or at an alternative URL.
Temporary issues: If the problem persists, the site may be experiencing an outage or you have triggered our bot protection. In both cases, the fix is simple: wait a few minutes and try again.

About Bot Protection

Our bot protection sometimes puts browsers into a short “time out” if it suspects automated traffic. This helps prevent traffic spikes from taking the site down. If this happens, it is rarely your fault. If you think you have been affected, even if the issue resolves, please report it.

When It Might Be More Serious

If the Oops page does not go away:

We could be offline due to an outage or a scheduled release.
Scheduled releases are announced on the site and rarely last more than three hours. If you still cannot access the site after four hours, it is unlikely to be a release.

What to Do Next

Use one of the contact methods listed on the Oops page. Discord is preferred. The #website-problems channel on discord is the fastest way to reach our Operations team.

And remember: do not assume we already know about the issue. If in doubt, reach out! Even if we are aware, your report helps us prioritise fixes.

Known issue: "Access Denied"

cstanton — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:33:55 GMT

While website security measures are being reconfigured you may experience an "access denied" message when accessing the element14 Community.

A solution to this is in progress, you may be able to work around it by either refreshing the page, or ensuring that you're using an up to date web browser (ie. not Windows 7 with Microsoft Edge) and more recently maintained.

Site Maintenance: Server Updates - 15th October 2025

cstanton — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:10:02 GMT

During the period of 9am to 9:30am on the 15th of October, UK time, the element14 Community will be unavailable.

It is possible that the website will not be accessible or will have its performance affected during a brief period before this time, and up to 6 hours after this time.

This is part of routine server maintenance from the development team.

Site maintenance : Search, 25th September (This Will Affect Site Content Listings)

Dudley — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 12:32:50 GMT

Site maintenance happening 03:30 UTC until 09:30 UTC 25th September 2025
We will be performing maintenance to our search servers which will be offline for the duration
While this is happening, the community site should be mostly available, however some widgets may not work correctly, recently created content will not appear in tabbed content widgets, and some small functions that rely on search may fail. This should mostly be restricted to registered users, guest users will be mostly unaffected as they will be served stale search results from cache.
We expect most of our work to be completed early in the release window. It is hoped that everything will be back to normal before the UK wakes up.
Once all the work is complete, everything will return to normal without intervention from us.
More details below

We're intending some further work to our new shiny search servers. These were created in an earlier site maintenance ( Site Maintenance 11th and 12th September :: Full Search Reindex ) and there are problems happening that we need to fix. The search service went down earlier today and having investigated what the problem was, it's been realised that it is serious and now we know it's there, we cannot leave it and we have to jump in to fix it.

To fix this will require us to unhook the search server, take down each node within the cluster, perform some maintenance, and then bring the whole lot up again, hook it back in, and cross our fingers! We could do this on a node by node basis, but for various reasons we've decided not to do that and take the entire cluster offline while we perform the necessary work.

We should not need to reindex anything, which should vastly reduce the impact to members. With a bit of luck and a following wind, we should be in and out pretty quickly.

element14 Community DevOps team.

Site Maintenance: 17th September 8AM-11AM

Dudley — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 13:38:35 GMT

Site maintenance will be happening on the morning of 17th September from 8AM until 11AM UK Time.
We will be doing a full site release of a new codebase
The site will be fully unavailable while we do the release. You will be presented with a maintenance page for all pages during the duration of the release.
We expect the site to be available from around 11AM onwards
It may well be earlier than 11am.

We'll be taking the site down at around 8am to apply the new version of our software with all the latest gizmos.

Matt has done a write up of the new features in this release that you might find interesting Upcoming Site Maintenance 17th September :: Release 2025-2

See you on the other side 🙂

Dudley

Resolved: Buy Now / Pop-Up Links to the Online Store

cstanton — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 10:15:53 GMT

There is an ongoing incident at present which prevents the functionality of 'buy now' links on the element14 Community.

The same issue may be affecting the online stores directly.

This is due to a disruption in the network to the data centre caused by damage to a fibre optic cable.

At present we do not have a timeline as to when this will be resolved.

Site Maintenance 11th and 12th September :: Full Search Reindex

Dudley — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:29:03 GMT

Site maintenance will be happening from Thursday 11th September 21:00 UTC until Friday 12th September 14:00 UTC
We will be rebuilding all our search indexes
While this is happening, search results may be empty, search functionality will not work, and some widgets may show no results or incomplete results
As the maintenance proceeds, search results will start to work but not for all types. There will be a period where you will get incomplete results from search, or where tabbed widgets work for some types but not for others
We expect the site to be fully functional by Friday 12th September 14:00 UTC, but if we have problems it is possible that it will continue into Friday night or Saturday morning
More detail below:

At some point on Thursday night going into Friday morning UK time, we will be replacing our search server with an entirely new setup. There will be no functional changes as a result of this, we're moving our Solr search services over to a new architecture and the codebase will remain unchanged.

When we move servers, we will lose all our search indexes, so we will need to recreate our search index. This is a standard procedure that we do occasionally after a major upgrade, and it takes between 8 and 36 hours to complete.

We will initiate that search reindex late on Thursday night UK time so we can monitor it going into Friday. The site will remain up, but the search function will be unavailable, and any of our widgets that rely on search will have issues. This includes many of the tabbed widgets that exist on the home page and on landing pages such as the raspberry pi page.

We've done everything we can to limit the impact on the membership and would usually run this sort of job over the weekend, but in this case with it being new architecture we are erring on the side of caution. We've done everything we can to mitigate the risk, but there is no test like production, and we'd prefer to be sitting and watching it happen as it goes live so that we can intervene should something go wrong.

We thank you for your patience and understanding!

element14 Community DevOps Team.

Resolved: Needing to Register before Downloading ebook

cstanton — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 12:23:49 GMT

There's currently an issue affecting the ability to download ebooks if you're a new user to the element14 Community.

Our integration with a third party for the form used for ebooks is causing a problem.

If you're new to the element14 Community and do not have an account to login to, when you attempt to download an ebook and register for the element14 Community using the form, you will receive an error and the registration will fail.

The workaround for this at present is to register for the element14 Community here: /user/createuser - then login to the website, and download the ebook.

Roadtest Enrolment: Keeping your Profile Information Consistent

cstanton — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 15:02:37 GMT

With the recent website release / update, we have also made a change when you're enrolling for RoadTests.

You can read the full update here:
Keeping your Profile Up to Date: Changes to How You Enrol for a RoadTest

After the fact Site Maintenance 3rd June :: Release 2025-1

Dudley — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 14:53:07 GMT

On Tuesday morning UK time we did a release of our 2025-1 code changes. Our first full release of the year! The site was down for approximately 4 hours as we deployed.

We should have mentioned this before the release happened, we are meant to post here before the release and let you know our schedule and our timings, and for reasons entirely within my control, this did not happen. I apologize for this oversight. We have a checklist of things that need to be done and a site announcement is not part of that checklist. I've remedied this and will make sure that doesn't happen again.

There were a lot of changes in this release. It included the latest platform release from Verint, 12.1.8 which included several bugs and issues that we'd reported to them. And also around 240 tickets from our dev team. Matt posted a blog that goes into much more detail and you can see that here.

Resolved: Website Performance 19th February 2025 - Update 17th April 2025

cstanton — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:53:01 GMT

The element14 Community team are currently responding to and managing a website security incident.

The only effect this is having is that the website may take longer to respond to participation actions (likes, bookmarks, upvotes, etc.) and time to load.

User data, information and website content are unaffected.

This thread may be updated with more information.

Resolved: Incident: Website Search and Performance 29th Jan 2025

cstanton — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 10:44:12 GMT

The development and server administrative teams became aware of Verint's search functionality and performance issues at 6:30 a.m. UK time.

This is affecting website widgets from presenting content to all users. For example, 'My Content' in your user profile, or the content listed on the element14 Community homepage.

A support ticket has been raised with the appropriate vendors. There's currently no timeline for a fix.

Upcoming site maintenance 12th November - 2024-4

Dudley — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 11:36:43 GMT

We will be deploying a scheduled release and the last release of the year next week on the 12th November. Previously we used to do site maintenance late in the US evenings, but there have been some changes and work will commence on the release at 08:00 UTC. As part of that release, we will be taking the site down for approximately two hours. For much of that time should you visit the site, you will be presented with either our oops page, or a site maintenance page.

You can see what's in the release over on the site blog Matt posted here: Upcoming Site Maintenance 12th November :: Release 2024-4

Should you experience any issues following the release, please post in our Feedback and Support area.

The element14 Development team

Resolved: Unable to Comment on Research Opportunities Blog

cstanton — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:41:10 GMT

There is currently a problem affecting this blog application: Research Opportunities

We are aware of an issue preventing anyone from commenting further on the blog posts.

This is being looked into, and if necessary, escalated with Verint.

Resolved: "You Have Too Many Outstanding Abuse Reports"

cstanton — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 12:50:50 GMT

There is a known issue where users may receive a 'blue box' on the element14 Community when posting comments or content on the website.

This can happen when the user has content that has been reported to the moderation queue and rejected.

The problem happens because the content is awaiting an 'appeal' from the user, even if it has previously been denied.

The ability to appeal is only available in the user's e-mail inbox, administrators and moderators cannot adjust or manipulate this.

We have raised this with Verint to ask for more control over this process, to allow users to continue to post even though they have content waiting to be deleted.

We ask that users look in their e-mail for the appeal functionality, to appeal their content that has been denied, especially if it is a 'first time' report so that we can see what we can do to clear this to allow members to further post.

Thank you for your patience.

Site Maintenance: Update to Embedded Forms/Content 17th July 1 pm to 6 pm UK Time

cstanton — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 09:45:22 GMT

There is scheduled maintenance during the hours of 1 pm to 5 pm UK Time on the 17th of July that will affect several areas of the element14 Community.

The areas affected will be:

- Quizzes
- RoadTests
- RoadTest Reviews
- Design Challenges
- eBooks

The maintenance intends to be completed at 6 pm, if there are any complications it may go into the evening.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Site Maintenance: 7am - 9am UK Time 2nd July 2024

cstanton — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 19:17:15 GMT

The element14 Community will be down during the stated time for database maintenance.