The upgrade to the database management system (DBMS) scheduled for November 21, 2023 has been completed. It is safe to resume making changes to your site.

On Tuesday November 21, 2023, we will be upgrading the database management system (DBMS) to a new version. As a result, sites will be periodically unavailable throughout the day. The outages are expected to be brief unless a full database restore is needed.

Please refrain from making any changes to your site on that day as we cannot guarantee that any changes made will be preserved.

The version of the DBMS we are using is nearing end-of-life and we need to upgrade in order to continue to receive updates that will maintain security, improve performance and add features.

Another notice will be posted once the upgrade is complete.

We will be moving servers this weekend between August 25 and August 28. We recommend not making any changes to your site until after the move is complete. A message will be posted here when the move is complete.

UPDATE: The server move has been successfully completed.

Due to a network issue at the data center, the onMason server was unreachable from approximately 6am to 10:30am. The network issue has been resolved.

The upgrade to the database management system (DBMS) scheduled for August 9, 2021 has been completed. It is safe to resume making changes to your site.

On Monday August 9, 2021, we will be upgrading the database management system (DBMS) to a new version. As a result, sites will be periodically unavailable during the day. Also, please do not make any changes to your site on August 9th as we cannot guarantee that any changes made will be preserved.

The version of the DBMS we are using is nearing end-of-life and we need to upgrade in order to continue to receive updates that will maintain security, improve performance and add features.

Another notice will be posted once the upgrade is complete.

We will be upgrading the software running onMason on Tuesday, August 11, 2020 between 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. As a result, onMason will be periodically unavailable during that time.

This past August, onMason celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. On one hand, it is quite the accomplishment to serve the Mason community for so long. On the other hand, it means that parts of onMason are a decade old. It’s time for some spring cleaning!

We took a look at some of the oldest parts of onMason and asked ourselves, does it still bring us joy? In many cases, the answer was no.

The first thing you might notice is that revamped the login. To prevent brute force password attacks, we have long limited how many incorrect logins you can attempt. While this has kept onMason safe, it resulted in a lot of password reset requests, probably because most people did not realize that we were limiting logins until too late. To reduce this, we added a warning about how many more login attempts are remaining before the system locks you out. Also, the system will automatically release the lock out after a certain amount of time. Yay! Not that I didn’t enjoy all the support requests …

We also ditched CAPTCHA. It has been more annoying than useful for a couple of years now. Not to worry, we employ a number of different, less intrusive methods of keeping your site safe and spam free(ish).

When we first set up onMason over a decade ago, we installed a theme pack that gave us more than 100 different themes – giving our users lots of good options. Fast forward to today, we have more than 100 themes that don’t meet modern coding standards and look very dated – giving our users lots of bad choices. Therefore, we whittled down the number of theme choices. Don’t worry, we didn’t suddenly change themes on existing sites, we just made it so you can’t choose obsolete themes if you change themes.

Along the same lines, we changed the default theme from TwentyTwelve to TwentySixteen. This doesn’t affect existing sites, only new ones.

Finally, we removed a bunch of old, seldom used plugins. This shouldn’t affect too many people since the plugins are seldom used after all.

The hope is that these changes make onMason easier to use and, ultimately, more satisfying.

On this day in 2009, onMason was made available to the Mason community.

A lot has changed in the tech world since 2009. In August 2009, the fastest computer you could buy came with a Intel Core 2 processor. And Windows Vista. Apple had just released their third iPhone, the iPhone 3GS. And at the time, no one at George Mason University offered WordPress blogs to the entire Mason community. Except us.

In order to provide better service, we will be moving servers starting on Thursday, August 24. The site will generally be available during this time, but there may be reduced performance and occasional downtimes during this transition. It is also recommended that you do not make major changes to your site during this time as well.