Forum Changes
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.
Unscheduled Maintenance
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.
Server slowdown update
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!
Server Problems/Forum Slowdown
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.
Hotmail problem update
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.