Posted by Jakob
Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:36:00 GMT
I am going to shut down the Guildspace forums at some point in the near future.
Note, I am talking about the currently unused Guildspace Support Forums - not the forums on the individual guild sites. The latter will naturally stay around.
There have not been enough real need for the forums, and I am spending way too much time removing spammers and their annoying ads from them, so they have to go, I’m afraid. I have already turned off the ability to sign up.
It sucks, but blame the spammers.
Posted in General, Status messages | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:42:54 GMT
Support for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
With todays release Guildspace officially supports Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. This primarily means that guilds using the Vanguard settings will get character attributes tailored to their game on the roster.
It also means that a couple of Vanguard-inspired themes has been added to Guildspace - and I snuck in a new, generic theme as well.
Welcome, Vanguard players.
New management interface
The administration section of each website now has it’s own seperate look’n’feel. This change has come about since it allows me more flexibility and ability to make the management user interface better and more usable. It also paves the way for some hopefully future changes, but more about those later.
Add images to news stories
It is now possible to upload images to individual news stories. This feature is still experimental and I need your feedback on how it works, and especially how it can be improved.
The goal here is to make it as easy as possible to add images of dead dragons and phat lewt to your news, so please, let me know how you’d prefer to do just that.
Bug fixes
- Fixed some issues with old character attributes appearing after a guild had changed its game settings.
- Fixed an issue where admins were not able to delete characters.
- Fixed a few issues with the payment system. The anti fraud protection guards were a bit too aggressive, I apologize for that.
Posted in Status messages | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:35:00 GMT
Everything looks like the server is having some serious hardware issues, which is making it unstable.
The end result of this, is that Guildspace will be moved to new hardware within the next 24 hours. This will result in some additional downtime (it’s not like we’d notice at this point) while the server is copied to the new hardware., There is also a small risk that any changes made to your website (for example comments posted or roster changes) in the next 24-36 hours will be lost in the move.
I apologize for the inconvenience of all this, and I am crossing my fingers that we won’t ever have to suffer problems like these again. I feel we’ve had our share by now.
Update, December 20th, 1PM GMT
My host informs me, that we’ve been moved to a new hardware setup already. This means, that the above process has been completed and there was no risk of lost data.
This is great news, but in any case , please please let me know if you experience any issues over the next days.
Merry christmas, everyone. Thanks a lot for your continuing Guildspace support.
Posted in Status messages | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Tue, 19 Dec 2006 08:52:17 GMT
Tell me about it. It looks the fixes employed by my server provider over the weekend didn’t help things a bit, and the server has been restarted a couple of times since then.
Today, I woke up to a bunch of server alert emails and I wasn’t even able to get in touch with the server to give everything a gentle backrub.
Sigh, this is driving me nuts, and it is frightingly similar to the situation on the old host, which caused me to move Guildspace where it is now.
Here’s hoping for a rapid improvement of this situation. I sure would prefer not to have to kick start the server every other hour over christmas.
Posted in Status messages | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Mon, 18 Dec 2006 09:01:10 GMT
Over the weekend Guildspace has been going up and down like a yo-yo and for that, I apologize. Unfortunately, it’s mostly caused by matters outside of my control.
My server provider has taken action, and installed a new kernel and the server. Hopefully that will resolve the issues so we can all continue to enjoy Guildspace.
Posted in Status messages | no comments | 88 trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:05:00 GMT
To celebrate the festive season, I’ve released a few changes to make your whole Guildspace experience as pleasant as possible:
Forums
- Disabled Gravatars for forumposts. They were unfortunately proving a bit unreliable, so I guess I’ll have to add Guildspace avatars.
News
- The link on the frontpage to adding a news story now works.
- News stories without titles should no longer break the list of news.
- Users are now redirected to the new frontpage instead of the news list after logging in.
Accounts and signup
- Fixed some minor issues with the signup page.
- Fixed a link to PayPal.
- Fixed error message when a new user hadn’t picked a plan.
- Fixed bug where deleted users would cause the XML export to fail with an error message.
- Improved user administration interface.
Events
- Finally added a link to delete events. I can’t believe I missed that link. The ability to delete events had always been there, just not linked from anywhere. Ah well, now it is.
Posted in News & updates | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Sat, 03 Jun 2006 13:40:00 GMT
In celebration of the Danish rainy summer, I’ve got around to updating Guildspace. A few things aligned for this to happen:
- I had a brief period without client work.
- A user actually approached me with an idea for a feature.
- That user bribed me with beer.
That’s all it takes ;) Here goes the patch notes:
Character profile images are now resized to a max width of 300 pixels.
It’s now possible for registered users to send emails directly to other users without knowing the other users email address.
The guild frontpage is now a dedicated page with links to specific areas of the website instead of just the first page of the news listing. It’s still news-focused, though.
The name of the guild is now clickable and will take you to the above guild frontpage.
Added signups to events in the calendar.
Made the procedure to sign up for a Guildspace website more error tolerant.
We’re now rolling on Rails 1.1, baby!
Some of the above changes have actually been live for quite a while, I just haven’t got around to posting about them.
Posted in News & updates | no comments | 1 trackback
Posted by Jakob
Wed, 08 Mar 2006 16:52:00 GMT
I have taken Guildspace down for some emergency maintenance following the move. Sorry.
Update: Phew, that was annoying, but I think I’ve got stuff running now without any dataloss. I apologize for the extra downtime.
Posted in Status messages | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:51:00 GMT
All your data has been moved to the new server, and it’s running smoothly. All that’s left to do now is to wait for the DNS changes to propagate to entire Internet. This can take up to 48 hours, but usually it’s much less.
Now, if you’re really longing for your website and cannot wait the hours it might take for it to reappear, you can access it using guildhome.net instead of guildspace.net. For example if your website is located at ubers.guildspace.net, you can now open ubers.guildhome.net and access your website.
Please peek around everywhere and do let me know if anything has broken in the move.
Update: Okay, I spoke too quickly and the new server did encounter a bunch of errors. It should work now, though. ::knocks on wood::
Posted in Status messages | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jakob
Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:42:00 GMT
Guildspace will be changing servers this coming Wednesday, March 8th. This means that all guild websites and www.guildspace.net will be taken offline and be unavailable from around 16:00 CET.
How long this downtime will last depends on where you are and how your provider has setup their network, so I cannot tell you exactly how long. Worst case is that they will unavailable for upwards of 48 hours, but consider yourself unlucky if that happens.
I will keep this weblog and the forums running for the duration, so you have somewhere to go for updates.
Posted in Status messages | no comments | no trackbacks
