Recent Events - Lie Free Edition

It has come to my attention that some of you had some trouble digesting my previous post which contained an atypical garnish of lies to add flavor to yet another hearty portion of my typical straight shooting. To clarify what is or is not the case I am making this special post to explain the events of the last week or so with respect to Mangatraders.com without making up random facts meant to entertain and/or mislead unwary minds.

NOTE: It has also come to my attention that I wrote a bit of code to cut off these posts so they wouldn't show up as such long bricks of text on the front page, I kept forgetting to make use of it...until now!

Click the link to see the full post and have your mind cleansed of the bitter taste of falsehood.

So you made it here then? Good, here's the promised truth. Anything in this post that's also in the previous post is probably true. If it's in the previous post but not this post it's either made up or I've forgotten about it since yesterday thus it's not that important.

As many of you probably noticed the site had been acting somewhat erratic for the past week and a half or so. Some of you may have even seen the maintenance message that showed up about a week ago when you tried to visit the site. And ever since that went away you may have noticed frequent periods where the site would be ridiculously slow or completely unresponsive. I held out on making this particular post until most of these issue seemed to be resolved because I felt they would have soured the news and it was supposed to be good news.

In and case, what happened was our datacenter had an awesome March sale with half off the first month deals on may good servers we availed ourselves of the bargains. Every server we had has been replaced with a newer more powerful one at pretty much the same price overall price we were paying before plus some setup fees that we had to pay extra for.

To make all this all happen without having to bring the site down completely Aftershock and I worked long and hard settting things up and moving things around behind the scenes. I worked on changing several things around to make the new file servers not only worked like the old ones but actually worked better. Most of the benefits I added in only benefit the back end which the majority of you probably don't care about but they are important all the same. I think the only thing that directly touches users is the fact that I sped up the uploading process so files go from the webserver to a moderators eyes more quickly which in turn should help get them activated more quickly. I won't bother going into details about the other stuff but I think the less stress the staff has to deal with while fixing back-end problems the better things should be overall and that's mostly what I tried to make happen. The file servers got replaced first and that happened about 10 days or so ago. So far everything on that end looks to be working just fine. The servers still have the same bandwidth restrictions so speeds shouldn't be changing remarkably but hopefully whatever bug that was causing download server 3 to crash so frequently did not follow us to the new servers.

Emboldened by the success of the file server transfer and lured in by the fancy specs of one of the server deals fearless leader Aftershock (who I will confirm is not a middle-aged Russian woman) decided to replace the webserver and database server with a newer, better, faster, stronger (comparatively)uber server. This happened about a week ago and was the cause for most of the problems many of you may have seen over the last week.

When setting up the new server Aftershock also upgraded to the latest version of the operating system we use. Apparently this wasn't the best idea as it contained a few rather nasty bugs. Most notably there was a problem with a part of the OS which handles files which was causing user uploads to simply disappear rather than follow the path through the system to end up on the site. The upload system (written by Aftershock) was not designed to detect that this sort of error had occurred so instead of displaying an explicit error message it would simply not display the usual success message and never pass the file along to my back end scripts which would move it along to the point where users can download it. Fortunately intrepid staff members noticed that their own uploads were not appearing on the site and brought it to Aftershocks attention and we think he was able to fix the problem. Independent of this uploading bug was the frequent crashing of the new server after a few hours of operation. Aftershock hasn't told me exactly what was wrong but he chalked it up to breaking in the new server and tweaking settings just right to get everything to run smoothly. At about 10 PM MT time on Tuesday night Aftershock declared things should be stable enough for now that I could make a post about it.

tl;dr Previous Post = Truth + April Fools. Some stuff happened, it doesn't really matter if you know about it or not. When really good things happen credit Aftershock, when really bad things happen blame Aftershock, when kind of good things happen credit Yukimura, when kind of bad things happen blame yourself first, then if you are sure it couldn't have been your fault, blame Yukimura. When everything is going normally and nothing good or bad is happening blame or credit any of the non administrators as you see fit.

NOTE: Blaming an admin doesn't mean you should automatically pm them about it. Trying resolving your issue with other staff members on in the support section first.

P.S. If you were gullible enough to believe I would really bring up something as tangential the site and my own ego as Aftershock's age, gender, or nationality in a serious front page post you could probably benefit from being either more skeptical or paying closer attention to my posting style.

P.P.S If you believed that ridiculous story and took any drastic measures in response, I'm am sorry. I hate April Fools Day gimmicks as much as the next guy and I think they are a bad influence on the world. Sadly I have surrendered to the institutionalization of the April Fools tradition and am I manage by paying attention to the date as March draws to a close and never believing anything I read or hear about on April 1st, your nerves and sanity may benefit from employing that strategy as well.

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