Technical report: The challenge of migrating the Altea Community

We experienced some technical difficulties when finally going online again with the Altea Community. Apologies for the inconvenience! Here’s what went wrong:

On 14th of April 2023, we migrated our users to a new user management platform. During this process, we encountered a technical problem. Some users received a default “Your password has been reset” message instead of a pre-configured message that explains how to re-register to the Community and activate your previous user account that has been migrated. We are sorry for the confusion caused by this and would like to share our postmortem report on how this issue was addressed and what steps will be taken to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

The new user management platform sent different messages depending on the users locale.

Upon investigation, we found that our new user management platform used the locale of the user when sending the “password reset” messages. This issue has not been encountered during the testing period since all test users had the English locale. Therefore, users with a German, French or Italian locale received the default message instead of the intended welcome message we had created. Of note, the messages have been distributed directly to the users they were intended to and no users’ data has been exposed to anyone.

Once we identified the root cause, we quickly took action to address the issue. We corrected the code so that all users would receive the correct message. Therefore, it is possible that you have received multiple e-mails from us, depending on your locale settings. We distributed the messages in smaller batches to be able to control possible future errors.

The problem is solved, and we are constantly working to ensure that no such issues will appear again. Thank you for your understanding and patience!

To prevent similar issues from happening in the future, we are implementing the following steps:

  • More thorough testing: We will be testing the user management platform with a wider range of users.
  • Ongoing monitoring: We will continue to monitor the user management platform and any related systems to catch any potential issues before they cause any problems for our users.
  • Clear communication: We will communicate any changes or updates to our users proactively.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the delivery of the default messages during the user migration. We have taken steps to address the issue and are committed to preventing similar incidents in the future. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

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