Drunkard's Walk Forums

Spacebattles' Forum is evidently locked.With whats either one of the most asinine notifications ever, or they have been hacked.
Anyone have any hard info?

Last I heard they had a new mod, like one of the guys who's got it in for CrW and BROB.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

The whole thing is down though, which would be an odd thing to do if you did not like a couple of sub-forums.
If this is supposed to be just a maintenance notification, it really is the most useless one I have ever seen.

It could likely be related to the problem with lag that they've been suffering from lately: essentially, their servers are getting old and are being overwhelmed by a rapid increase in new content, the daily backup creation takes up even more resources (which obviously isn't helping much), the site's manager (who is the only one who can make the necessary hardware upgrades) has been busy with other stuff recently and is thus as yet unable to get around to actually making those upgrades, and so the other admins have been deleting certain functions (such as the search and e-mail notification functions) and even temporarily shutting down the board during the lag periods in an effort to combat the lag.  A number of posters have noted that much of the recent increase in user content has come from the BROB and CrW sections, and have thus proposed placing restrictions on time between posts in those sections (which would be even longer than the forum-wide minute-long mandatory minimum between posts) or even temporarily locking them in the hopes that it'll put less strain on the servers, at least until new hardware could be installed (which, at this point, itn's likely to take place in the next several months, at least).  In the meantime, though, a lot of sacrifices have to be made (and are being made) in order to ensure that the forums at least remain in some usable state until then.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I felt that I should try to put this in its proper context so that you guys could at least understand what's currently going on.

Ah yes, the 'kill the most popular parts of the site' strategy. I've seen sites, even worked on one where that plan was proposed, and I've NEVER seen it work.

I hope it comes back up again, even if it's only in Read Only mode. That's the only place where my fic lives with actual revisions - which is my own fault for not archiving the tense corrections that people pointed out to me but still.

For those of you howling about theoretical persecution, Spacebattles has resumed normal service with all the boards operating as they're supposed to.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

So it looks like it was indeed simply just the most asinine "down for maintenance" notice possible.
They should look into the possibility of just going read-only during backups like TTH does, even if that takes the form of kicking over to a read-only slave server ( which would be somewhat trivial to implement, even on a relatively weak server).

Been talking to the folks over in the creative writing chat. Thing is, the 'owner' of Space Battles simply can't be bothered into doing anything with it. You see, the whole kit and kaboodle basically runs off an old desktop machine in his house. No joke. And now that the SB forums has grown exponentially, the hardware needs to be upgraded. Only he won't. Because real life stuff.

Really, if real life is such a problem then I don't see why he just have SB hosted on a real server somewhere. I hear that Rackspace offers good rates, and it's not like money is an issue (because it isn't, I've been told).

So that's why they've been resorting to utterly ridiculous stuff.

I'll admit, once I was in on the goings on, the shit became utterly freaking hilarious. Example: Admin made some changes that rendered everything on SB Forums (including you're own user menus and information pages) private. He then posted a notice requesting that anyone still locked out go ahead and PM him... except that anyone who was locked out couldn't access the menu to send a PM! That shit had me chortling for a while.

What was even more interesting was how word was getting around. SBers without access were using strange methods to get SBers with access to PM the Admin their forum handles so their accounts could be fixed. Most were coming in via the IRC channel, but I heard that one got PMed by another SBer through his Steam account. :p

Great. I'm one of the users still locked out (username: tortiecat) and any SB contacts I have are either here or on SDN. Is there anyone here with access who can pass my username to the Admins?

Message sent to The Observer. Should be good to go in a little while.

Thank you. Of course, I just PM'ed someone on SDN for help. Welp, I guess a little redundancy never hurts.

Same catch-22 here, for my "Nemonowan" user.
Could somebody PM The Observer for me?

If someone who's SB login lets them do anything could also pass a message along for me as my 'nocarename' account there is prevented from seeing anything but error pages, I would also be much obliged.EDIT: And now I'm in. If someone did send a PM, thanks muchly.

It's running the lag-fest for me right now, as of 12:41pm est, so I do not know if the issue has been fixed for me. Testing with login and appears I'm still getting the error message for my chibipoe account. Wait... looks like it is fixed for me.
"This hand of mine glows with an awesome power. Its burning grip tells me to defeat you....
Shining FINGER!" -Domon Kashuu, Mobile Fighter G Gundam

Nemo, you still locked out?

I'm not sure what's up with it, but I know I can't access the site during Eastern Standard Time (3pm - 10pm). I have to wait until either my lunchbreak or like 1am at night if I want to read anything on it.

I could get in a couple of hours after my post. It seemed to work all right yesterday.
Today all I get is a blank page with "An unexpected error occurred. Please try again later." . Which is a different problem altogether.

I got that a few times.... then it works again.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

I occasionally get: An unexpected database error occurred. Please try again later.

When ever I go to ANYTHING on the Spacebattles forums.
_____________
Veni, vidi, vici. [I came, I saw, I conquered
Quote from Julius Caesar

I haven't been having any trouble with it, beyond the usual tendency to jam up in the late afternoon (UK time).
Of course, I only need to mention that, and the jamming up get's suddenly worse.

Yeah, looks like SpazBattles is having another attack.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

I finally found out that effectively, Spacebattles sits on an old desktop. O.o
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

Shouldn't that be a desktop squared?

Still I hope it's not too old of a one, as replacement parts can be an issue. Also it has me wondering why no-ones offered an old server or three, apart from the fact that a rackmounted model's a pain to use in a enclosed space. Fan noise that's worse than what ever a laptop or a certain high-spec graphics card produces is the main reason I've never had mine running.

Quote:Foxboy wrote:

---

I finally found out that effectively, Spacebattles sits on an old desktop. O.o

.... Didn't I just say that earlier? O_o;