Site Loads Really Slowly For You?
Ads Showing Up, Even Though You Donated?
The hot issues for the previous week...
Forum Posting Problem
This was a bear to track down. The main problem was that we couldn't reproduce it here... and if we can't reproduce it then we really had no way of knowing if we had fixed it or not. Finally, after talking with a number of users on IM and reading threads such as this one we finally managed to track it down to a problem with our CDN -- content delivery network.
A CDN is a network owned by a company that has servers available across the world that agree to distribute your files for you. We're still looking into this, but it looks like the servers in the UK region of the world weren't serving the latest files, which was causing definite problems.
Login Glitch
The logins were down for about 30 minutes, causing some users to think that they had been hacked. On this one all I can do is offer our apologies -- we were trying to close a security hole that we had found, rushed it, and ended up shutting down logins. Measures are in place to make sure that this does not happen again.
Posting History
This is kind of a good news/bad news situation here. The good news is that the posting history for the donators should now be available. The bad news is that translating the posting history for everyone else is going to take a couple of weeks at the going rate. (One of the things the forum rewrite was meant to do was make everything much faster and more scalable. Unfortunately, this means that the format for the posting history has to change as well).
The problem is that the current method of migrating posting history takes too many resources if the thread has more than 500 replies, and there are quite a few threads like that in our forums. Threads with less than 100 replies are no problem and are converted on the fly, but to convert the others we need to run a background process, and we can't run it at a very high priority because we don't want to hurt the performance of the site in general.
Anyway, we're looking at ways of speeding this up without impacting anyone -- if we come up with anything I will definitely let everyone know. But, for now: we know about the posting history, and we are working on it! Worst case is that it takes a couple more weeks for everyone's posting history to be up to date -- we understand that this is definitely not ideal.
Bugs Being Fixed
- fixed the fact that people couldn't post!
- various moderation glitches from the forum backend rewrite
- some colored names issues in forums
- pagination for threads >= 1000 messages
- some art arena bugs
- bunches of little marketplace and forum issues
UPDATE 9/27
Patch rolling out today that should take care of the ads that donators are seeing. Also, we found a clever solution to the posting history problem... so, instead of waiting, you should be able to access post history now.
UPDATE 9/25
My desk is perhaps not as uncluttered as one might like, and it is frequently littered with the containersdylove crazy. She wants to remove the containers, and somehow does not buy my explanation that my desk is a delicately tuned ecosystem of cans and bottles that must not be tampered with. She'll stand near my desk while we talk and I can see her hands twitching, as if at any moment she'll start screaming and grabbing recycle stuff with wild abandon.
You think I'm making this up, but really, if I'm drinking something when andylove comes up, she watches my container like a mongoose, ready to strike and take it away as soon as it touches the table.
Anyway, I come into work this morning, and the battle of wills has escalated to the next stage. andylove and foobarbazquux had decided to take my pragmatic philosophy to an extreme and "enhance" my cube:
You see the conditions under which I have to work! My revenge will happen, and it will be sweet.
Community Member
Now to go report this in my dev update thread. :3