News from the Top

The server maintenance on 7/14/2009 has been postponed by a day due to technical difficulties. WICH, AOKH, ETWH, SPOREH, and DOW2H will be down (not all at the same time) on July 15th, 2009 between 10pm and 11pm for software upgrades. Radiant is being upgraded from 0.7.1 to 0.8.0 and the Gallery extension is being upgraded to the latest version.

Our ISP appears to experiencing some issues with Comcast customers which may cause the server to respond extremely slow. The problem is currently being looked at.

The topics/page and replies/page settings have been removed and set to 25/page to alleviate server load during prime times—this change should give a slight speed boost to how fast things load on the site, as well as making way for better caching of dynamically-generated pages.

In the templates, user location, skype, and www icons have been removed. Those items can still be found in the user profile.

The user database back-end was partially converted to a relational database as part of the efforts to lower server-load. The change is also required for the following purposes:

• to reduce penalties incurred from disk I/O operations, especially when admins need to track down smurves
• to greatly speed up user-lookups in the admin interface
• to support the upcoming user-to-user messaging feature
• to support upcoming changes to the user-registration system to make it a lot less frustrating if the email/user name is not valid for any number of reasons (email/user already exists, username contains censored words, email banned, etc.)
• to support the upcoming CRM system

Partially because other apps on HG are still using the old file-based user database format.

The registration sentinels have also have been balanced. They are now a little less aggressive, and more caching proxies operated by ISPs have been added to the white list.

The secondary hard drive on our server developed some file system corruption problems earlier today, resulting in unscheduled maintenance from around 9:20pm to 10:30pm EST. The problems have been fixed, SMART reports the HD itself is doing fine, so things should be back to the norm.

Update 1: Zope is down; rest of the server is up.

We think we’ve eliminated the source of the problems, but will require a few more days of monitoring to verify that it’s fixed for sure. Until then, surf on!

We’re currently investigating why the server’s CPU load is so high when traffic have stayed relatively the same – please bear with us while our tech angels “exorcise” the problem.

A quick update on where we are with Hotmail:

• They are still discarding emails sent from HG
• We are waiting for Microsoft to process our application into their Junk-Mail reporting program which should assist us in figuring out what their problem with our mail is
• The Hotmail.* restriction on new user registrations have been extended indefinitely until the problem is fixed.

Unfortunately there is no ETA on the resolution of the problem. In the meantime, please check out alternate email providers such as Google Mail and Yahoo Mail.

Microsoft have been discarding emails from HeavenGames for the past week or so, and we have been talking with their technical (non)support for the past few days now. In our most recent conversation they suggested that we apply for their Junk Mail Reporting Program as the latest step to troubleshoot the problem. Unfortunately, we got a reply from our application and this is what they say:

Thank you for your interest in the JMR program. We are currently experiencing an unusually large volume of requests. Your request will be processed in the order received. We don’t normally provide status updates in these circumstances as it takes time away from reducing the backlog. However, since it may take up to two weeks to get to your request we are sending you this notice. We will notify you if we need information or when we reach the next phase in your enrollment. Thank you for your patience.

The other alternative is to buy into their blackmail scheme and pony up $1,400 to apply for a certification with Sender Score Certified™.

So, regretfully, for up to two weeks forum account registrations with hotmail.com and hotmail.co.uk email addresses will not be accepted. However, we do accept account registrations from other free email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, so check them out.

We’ve enabled Greylisting on our mail server. This is a measure to cut down the surge of spam we’ve experienced lately.

One downside to the measure is that there may be a delay introduced to our email system ranging from 5 minutes to an hour – the delay will be dependent on the sender’s server’s configuration, as well as whether the sender is auto-whitelisted by the spam filter (if it is on the whitelist there will be no delay.)

The Denial of Service attacks appear to have subsided; services are returning to normal.