Additional information:
iBoats developers normally schedule software releases for Thursday early morning. Last week's software update (which included a major improvement for propeller listings in shop) did not pass QA and was instead pushed and released this morning. This was the 9th software release in 10 weeks so the software team has been very busy.
There are 3 software developers located in the US, 4 located overseas, and 2 team members at iBoats HQ supervising them.
Almost all of the problems we're seeing relate to the HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the various technologies we use at iBoats: Magento for e-commerce, vBulletin for forums, Drupal for photos and professional listings, and custom PERL for classifieds. I'm happy to report that we've made good progress with Magento resulting in growing sales (this is what pays the bills for the forum).
As to the HTML/CSS/JS impacting the forums, while we built and tested this software release on our development servers, for some reason the error we're now seeing only presented after pushing the software to production. We're not exactly sure how, but suspect there could be an issue with our CDNs or one of our many servers. All of this combined is a complex system. I've asked the team to specifically find out why/how the HTML/CSS errors weren't visible in development--so we can improve testing to make sure it doesn't happen again (although it's proven quite elusive).
What to expect? The CSS/HTML fixes were planned to take place in 4 stages in April in May. Today's release is the 3rd such release. We still have 1 more planned software release to get the HTML/CSS correct (based on what we know was broken a few months back).
I want to invite any moderators that would like to do so to participate in testing the software in our development environments. Please PM Tim and myself to be setup and given access to our development servers.
