Outage Over

[Carl]

Things are back to normal! I'm investigating why our server decided not to start back up after what looks like a minor crash last night.

Regardless, I will not be doing anything to make it glitchy any time soon, in order to make up for the travesty of instability that the past 24h have been. Let me know of any related issues here - problems with sessions, etc. Everything should be working as expected.

[Tixxis]

It was really weird, Carl. At first I could not access the site: 'web page cannot be displayed'.
But then I could and when I wanted to post something, the page changed again and showed a lot of programming lingo.
I didn't realize it was a glitch. I now wish I'd taken a screenie so you could see what it looked like.

[Carl]

At first it was, great that was easy... then the code on the 2nd load. Yeah, it was ugly. Thankfully I found the cause fairly fast so that we could return to normal.

[Shewolf13]

Thanks for working so quickly Carl ^^

[Koalagirll]

Great job on fixing it so fast! Your guides are life!

[dragon red]

Yes, kudos on the repair job!

[Carl]

Thanks guys. I will need to reboot here in a bit, as soon as I'm ready. We will not have repeat outages today, just don't want someone to think we've completely crashed again.

[Carl]

In 15 minutes, I will do a reboot of the server to ensure that all services start properly in the event of an outage.

I'm very sorry to everyone for our rockiness lately, but can assure that after today, it will be a couple of months before I mess with anything again. Believe me when I say, I'd love to be making guides instead 

[Carl]

Glad to say everything went well, though I'll have to watch it very carefully for instability. No more connection drops today, at least planned ones

Thanks so much for your patience and support, everyone.

[Carl]

That was all sooooo worth it.  In browsing the guide on mobile it's much faster. Ads are the only thing that slow it down but at least the content is loaded quick for reading  I cut image sizes 80% without noticeably reducing quality, so those of you on "unlimited" plans that drop speed after a few GB should have a better time, conserving bandwidth and loading much better even when slowed. A lot has changed the past 2 days and while I cannot guarantee we won't have some instability until the kinks are ironed out, the downtime was beneficial for our future. Except, ya know, that part where it died for 8 hours while I slept...

Improving the experience around here is important to me so I'm always open to suggestions. I'll be axing an ad or two from the guide as soon as it's doable. 

And of course more Sims guides... though I plan to extensively write about a fun little game called Don't Starve with some of my spare time.

[JudesSims]

Cool! I love Don't Starve! Sims is still my first love though

[Nettlejuice]

I can get on the site again! I don't think I appreciate the site as much as I did when I couldn't get on yesterday! Thank you so much Carl and everyone else here <3

[Carl]

Please report any speed/loading issues here. I have some major distractions this moment but would like to know if it's affecting others, as it could save me some time.

Edit at 8:18PM: That was me, do believe i knocked it out but do keep me informed of any problems this evening.

[Joria]

Was all that the start of the serious mess of last night and earlier today?  Thank you so much for getting on it so quickly.  I was starting to have withdrawal symptoms and wound up playing mahjong until 5 am just to get through it all.

[Carl]

We've been experiencing major network issues the past few days, but I think everyone can get in OK now. Just want to acknowledge that there is a problem and that I'm working to fix it. To disavow myself of guilt, I'll also say it is unrelated to recent maintenance. 

@Joria I was typing this as you posted, it's entirely unrelated to my performance tweaks but let's say those tweaks very much came in handy this weekend to keep *some* people able to visit.