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March 2022 on vAMSYS


Lukas Jankauskas

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  • vAMSYS Platform Administrator

Time flies - it's time for our March update!

March 2022 on vAMSYS

Infrastructure

On this front, the lack of news is good news. Our investment (of both time and money!) in transferring vAMSYS to new servers is paying dividends, and the platform is as stable as it has ever been (and a fair bit faster too).

We are not experiencing CPU bottlenecking like before when we want vAMSYS to do some heavy lifting and other than the need to sometimes manually reset the jobs queue - it is going swimmingly well.

Here at vAMSYS HQ we are quite happy with how things are and are not expecting any major changes this year.

Platform changes over March

We have continued our "v4-ification" of Orwell at a reasonable, albeit a bit slower pace than February. At the time of writing, we have completed:

  • VDS Settings
  • Design & Social
  • Pegasus Sounds
  • Pages
  • Billing

This only leaves us with the scoring-related pages, forum setup, ranks, staff and pilot invites sections from the management menu, PIREP and PIREP claims on the review side and events! We'd like to see these done by the end of April, but no promises!

If you haven't already...

The vAMSYS file manager is being retired on the 10th April. You need to make sure that anything you want to keep is moved to an alternative location:

  • for downloads such as checklists and aircraft configs, the forums are your best bet
  • for images embedded in pages, please use the direct upload functionality
  • for CSS, logos, and background images, please upload the files directly on the Design and Social page in Orwell

On 10th April, the file manager will be removed from the platform, and any data stored there will be lost forever (a very long time).

Bugs, Support and Ideas

Support is a key touch-point for us and something we like to try and get right. This extends to bug reports and feature requests. With that in mind, we completely "remastered" the current processes and have what is pretty much a new support (bugs and feature requests inclusive) operation.

If you haven't read it yet, we published a comprehensive announcement on this a few weeks ago.

April on vAMSYS

As mentioned above, our priority remains on completing the Orwell rewrite. Once it's done or we are very close to wrapping it up, we intend to open a consultation on our Discord in regards to the future of VDS. (Not on our Discord yet?)

We envisage a week long consultation with VA owners and staff as to what they want to see and do in VDS and how we can make it happen. We'll pull from your submitted ideas/enhancements and, with our combined brain power, are sure to come up with something which will serve us all well into the future.

The prime focus of the consultation will not be to implement brand new things affecting flight booking (we cannot really do anything new on current Phoenix), but it will allow us to update VDS in a way which will lay down the foundations for rapid feature implementation during and after the Phoenix upgrade, which we will decide on during the consultation.

Phoenix in 2022

I got asked this the other day, so I thought I would make it very clear as to how we will go about upgrading Phoenix when its time comes later this year. Phoenix development will not follow the same approach as Orwell or VDS where we make incremental changes and they are pushed to end-users as soon as they are ready.

Our Phoenix approach will be to update it in isolation to the new version. This is primarily because the ability for VAs to add custom CSS overrides (which a lot of VAs have made good use of) does not allow us to change things on-the-go and maintain your design. With that in mind, and probably for the better, as soon as we have something to show, an alpha version will be made available to VA owners and staff. Later in development, we'll make a beta version available to pilots too.

This stage will be the longest, as we will be looking to add some of the features requested. The beta stage, where we open them up to pilots, will allow us to see them in use.

~~~~~

Thanks for reading this month's update (and double kudos if you read it all)! If you've any queries, please feel free to get in touch via the usual channels.

Until next time! 🙂

- Lukas, George and the vAMSYS team

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