For the activators out earlier today there was a brief outage of RBNHole between about 1500 UTC and about 2000 UTC. While you might think this somehow related to the recent changes I can happily report that it wasn’t and instead was caused by an alert that had emojis in its comments field.
While emojis in the comments field fits under the “I wouldn’t have ever thought someone would ever do that” category, in the spirit of being tolerant of what is accepted we’ve updated the underlying database and added this to our five-yearly reminder that MySQL doesn’t default to UTF-8 unlike every other sane database system.