Help wanted: JOBI Is closed for submissions until we can upgrade this very old web application

[arfon]

The Journal of Brief Ideas is now unfortunately broken, with no immediate prospect of a 'quick fix'. Some background:

• The journal was built by some volunteers more than 10 years ago, and has been running on very limited amounts of support since.
• The site runs an old version of Ruby on Rails (and Ruby too) and is deployed to Heroku.
• We've managed to just about keep the site up and running over the past few years, but now are unable to deploy any changes to the site without upgrading the Heroku 'stack' (the build environment), which in itself, would require a major refactor of the codebase.

The straw that broke the camel's back: Last week, Heroku updated the Redis server that supports this application and the age of the Ruby version and Redis gem means we're unable to support new submissions any longer.

My recommendation

At this point, I think it's probably time to re-write this codebase using an up to date framework. A new version of Rails would be fine, and the codebase isn't that large, but when I last investigated this, many of the core dependencies (e.g., for the frontend) are no longer supported.

Might you be able to help?