Where was the comms today? We just ran a major chain upgrade with no signal to the community.
v7.3.0 was tagged Sept 17, and #79 went up 15 minutes later.
I can’t find a single forum post about it — not when it went up, not during the upgrade, and not after.
At 14:58 UTC, the chain hit the upgrade height and made no blocks for an hour and a half.
When it came back, 3 of the 11 validators were missing, including ecoBridge.earth, the biggest one. For a while, we were running about 7 points above halting again.
As I write this:
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10 of 11 validators are back
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MekongLabs is still down and gets jailed tomorrow morning if nobody reaches them
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ecostake’s public endpoint, which a lot of tooling reads, is still stuck at the upgrade block
There is no cohort of support from the projects using our chain, much less any kind of turnout.
Six of the last eight proposals came from my steward account.
What every upgrade needs from now on
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A forum thread the day the proposal goes up
Include the upgrade height, estimated time, binaries, and validator checklist. -
Live status during the upgrade window
Followed by a short post-mortem after the chain is stable. -
One named person responsible for chain communications
And a named backup. -
A post-mortem for this upgrade
What happened, why block production stopped for as long as it did, which validators missed the upgrade, and what changes before the next one.
If nobody owns this, I’ll run it — but then it has to be recognized as work.