Thank You, Miah!

Scott Hardie | November 14, 2008
You're reading this on the new server. May our "connection timeout" problems be gone for good.

Here's a HUGE thank you to Jeremiah Poisson for providing the solution. This machine is much more powerful and configurable. And also, it doesn't lock up every ten minutes!

Best part: I had dreaded spending the entire weekend on this migration, since the last one took three days. But this migration was done in a matter of hours, and now I get to spend the weekend having fun. I haven't been in this great of a mood since GooCon. THANK YOU, MIAH!

Scott Hardie | November 14, 2008
I should mention that with any migration, there's potential for little weird differences between servers, or things that I forgot to set up correctly on this one. If you notice anything wrong, please alert me. The most likely thing to break will be the automatic site update at midnight (3 new free cards in RB, anniversaries/birthdays in Dashboard, and a new goo if the game wasn't on hiatus), but I'll be around at midnight to fix this problem if it comes up.

Steve Dunn | November 15, 2008
YES!!

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2008
Update: The RB free cards script is not working, and it's going to take a while to figure out. There will be free cards for Saturday after I do. I don't know why Mihai's birthday was announced a second time; the server clock is correct.

Steve West | November 15, 2008
This is good, very good. Thanks Scott and Miah. Minor stuff - my discussion archive has been messed up for months meaning I can't search for past discussions although it appears others can; the dates for Goo Master are messed up; Goo Streaker still broken; I haven't won a Goo tournament for a long time; wait... ignore that last one.

Amy Austin | November 15, 2008
I haven't been able to search discussions (in case you're grouping me with "others", Steve) -- I've either found what I needed in "Recent Discussions" or manually scrolled back through them via the navigation feature at the top of each discussion. I figured (perhaps erroneously?) that Scott knew this already and was working on it -- I don't want to be a pest... especially since I think I've griped the most about the infernal timeout situation (good riddance!!!), but I do have all the same issues that you mention. Including not winning a tournament... since 2005! Grrr...

Amy Austin | November 15, 2008
Thanks, indeed!!! (I hadn't realized that it was all a brand new discussion... and I needed to read it all -- I only responded to the last two comments!)

But a big WOOHOO to all concerned!!! (Scott and Miah... who rock indeed. ;-D)

Amy Austin | November 15, 2008
On Mihai's birthday announcement... I just thought it was some weird overlap issue, because I had one discussion that also appeared without any new comments -- one that I had already read the latest comments on -- and since it was the only one, I figured that was how it was intended... to make sure nothing fell through the cracks.

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2008
I was vaguely aware of the Discussion Archive not working, since I think Aaron mentioned it, but I figured it was either low memory on the old server or a fluke. I almost always run searches from the top of the site, so I wasn't acutely aware of it. The way the Archive is built, it simply runs out of memory; there are 27,894 comments in TC as of this one, and it has to load them all in order to do a proper author & date search. I can rebuild it differently not to have to load all of that data into memory, but that means rebuilding it from scratch. I had planned to use Google Site Search with the upcoming redo of the site, getting rid of the searchable archives, and it seems like a better use of my time to focus on that instead of rebuilding the Archives only to throw them out. Is the Archive still useful enough that you want it back exactly the way it is/was?

Goo master dates are fixed. I had changed the way dates are stored with the current round, and I didn't notice that broken after we switched back from the "beta" site.

Goo streaker doesn't seem broken to me. It ignores current goos, so all of Round XXXVI won't count until Tuesday. Is it still broken beyond that?

Amy: Originally I wrote the migration-complete announcement in "Free at Last," but moved the comments here to a new discussion. This resulted in Dashboard notifying some people to read "Free at Last" since it had new content, and I couldn't tell who already had that notification pending so I couldn't delete it for the right people.

Steve West | November 15, 2008
Those numbers for Goo streaker have been like they are for two rounds I think (into a third?). Wait for the current ones to be revealed and we'll see. Did you fix that "me not winning the Goo tournament" yet?

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2008
I'm working on it. Should be ready by next round. :-P

The streaker numbers have been prone to breakdown since the game went daily. During an earlier incarnation of the site, I remember being so frustrated after fixing them five times that I simply took the tool off the site and refused to put it back. I will keep an eye on them this time and see if they need fixing again.

Is anybody else besides me still getting flashes of the old site? I'll surf this one just fine for a few minutes, then suddenly I'll click a link and it tells me I'm looking at the old server. I can think of several explanations, both serious and not, and I'm curious if I'm the only person seeing this.

Steve West | November 15, 2008
I haven't seen it and I've been on and off all day.

Amy Austin | November 15, 2008
I probably haven't been off and on as much as Steve, but I don't think I've seen anything like that.

Umm... how are you going to fix the same problem for me *and* Steve by next round? Unless he was using "me" as shorthand for "Amy"? I'm sure that must be it.

Steve West | November 15, 2008
Maybe I'll settle for a tie. Me and Amy win... No, I meant me. Me = Steve. Definitely.

Amy Austin | November 15, 2008
Me = MeMeMe! = Amy. No doubt.

Scott Hardie | November 17, 2008
When one of you makes a higher offer than Russ, we'll talk.

Fyi, I still don't know what's wrong with the nightly scripts (RB free cards, etc). I don't expect them to run correctly tonight, which means I'll have to activate them manually in the morning, but I hope to have them fixed by tomorrow night.

Amy Austin | November 17, 2008
Ohhh... hell... no...

In the immortal words of Achmed the Terrorist: I kill you!

Scott Hardie | November 18, 2008
The nightly scripts are still not running. I don't get it. I've triple-checked everything and they just don't run, right beside other scheduled scripts that run just fine. I've put in some additional monitoring so I can understand what's happening, but for now I still have to activate them manually.

You were right about the streaks, Steve. The list should be fully repaired now. The structure of the game these days, with a super-hard tournament every 50 goos, makes it unduly difficult for anyone to top the numbers that are showing there now. One must not merely guess 89 goos in a row to top Russ's total; one must pass through a tournament without missing a single goo, which requires exceptional gameplay. (Granted, you can fail to guess at all in the first 24 hours, drop out of the tournament, and still catch up over the next six days, so it doesn't necessarily require you to be a champion.) Another way of looking at it is that the "current streaks" list tends to get wiped clean every 50 goos, so good luck cracking the "personal bests" top ten.

Scott Hardie | February 16, 2009
Fyi, long technical story short, the site may experience weirdness for the next couple of days, as my timed upkeep scripts are deactivated and restored. Things that happen automatically in the background like userrank calculations will stop temporarily. The only major problems might be the midnight updates (new goo, free RB cards, anniversary/birthday announcements), which I'll activate manually if they don't happen on their own. Everything should be back to normal by mid-week. This is the last part of migrating to Miah's server, something that I didn't do back in November because it wasn't ready yet.

Scott Hardie | September 13, 2009
Not only did Miah rescue us from those terrible previous webhosts, but he has now agreed to host Kelly's site for free and drastically reduce the cost of hosting this site. It feels weird to say this publicly because I don't think I should give out the details of what this site costs, but for what it's worth, I'd still like to say that Miah has done a great deal to keep this site running, and I want people to appreciate it. Thank you again, Miah!

Steve West | September 13, 2009
You da man! Can't wait to see you and Ines again next year.