Resolved in our telephone discussion today (18 dec). For the next few months we are only likely to be able to do very minor tweaks, so it is fortunate that the site is currently in pretty good shape! Hopefully at some point we can come back and add some of the new features we have discussed.

It's probably on the order of 2-4 hours, so based what you said we should probably hold off for now. Just so you know I recently did this for another site, and it turns out that the tricky part is coordinating the switch from mongrel to passenger to keep downtime to a minimum.

Hmm, okay, see the point. But don't want to use up all the time reserves - might this be many hours of work (in which case I'm reluctant), or only one-or-two (In which case I'm fine)?

I was hoping someone would chime in :)
Moving to passenger + ruby enterprise is a preemptive move to simplify things, so it is potentially reducing technical debt over the long term. Also I just checked the server and with 3 mongrels we are just barely eating into swap so things are running fine, but there is not much wiggle room. In regards to budget I haven't used much of my retainer hours recently so maybe this is a good use for those?

I agree with the concept, but need to prove need! Shouldn't we do this when we have a problem (have a very limited budget - let's keep the budget to what is demonstrable needed).

Maybe I should prevent changing this one's name after that, as it will break links if we do (or find another clever mechanism)

try to add an empty comment (ie. go to a posting and press "post this commnet" with the comment box empty).

it should just put you back at the comment box with an error message. which I will do together with edit comment.

Fixed the problem with the Start a Discussion button (was IE6 problem).

However it appears that some youtube embeds are not working on IE6. Not sure if there /is/ a fix for these, but made separate task in any case