R2 Songs Fixed

I was told this afternoon that the R2 version of FFR was not loading songs. I wanted to apologize for the problem and let everyone know that R2 is now working correctly again. Let me know if you experience any problems with the game.

Cheers,

Synthlight

New Multiplayer Server

If you cannot connect to multiplayer but where able to yesterday or earlier today, please clear your cache. I switched everyone over to the new multiplayer server today at around 2:30pm Central Time.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Multiplayer Changes

I will be working on Multiplayer bugs tonight and have hopefully squashed the “clearing” bug that is annoying everyone. I will have to do some testing tonight to make sure that fix (and others) works without any problems.

Hopefully we will make some progress against the spammers and attention whores in there.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Small Changes

Because of the load spikes that nearly brought FFR to a standstill every hour, we were forced to switch over onto completely new servers. The new server has more ram and 3x the CPU power.

In the next 2 weeks we will be saying goodbye to Texas and moving the server again to a colocation facility located within the Chicago Board of Trade building in Chicago. We will be leasing a Dual Opteron server with dual cores on each CPU. The server will have approximately 12GB of ram. Because we are leasing vs renting, our operating cost will go down and our server ability will go up about 5x (hint, new projects). I will also be within a 40 minute drive of the datacenter just in case anything happens.

I had a few minutes to add some of the older header information back in at the top of the main page, forum and adjusted some forum colors. There may be a few oddities in the forum (small fonts) until I get time later on to finish what I started.

It’s starting to feel normal around here again.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Testing Testing Testing

# of online users and a few other things might not look right tonight until the new IP has propagated. You should notice a speed increase even though we have not installed php accelerators or optimized anything on the new server yet.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Load Spikes

For the last 2 weeks we have been experiencing massive load spikes on the 5th minute of every hour.. This has caused apache restarting and problems connecting at certain peak times. I just wanted to let everyone know that I finally solved the problem. No, I am not sharing the solution nor the cause.

Cheers,

Synthlight

SERVER CLOCK!!!

Now that I have your attention, I would like everyone to note that server time has been adjusted to be correct. Please adjust your timezones accordingly in your user settings.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Experiment X part 3

Tonight we will be working on a number of improvements and cleanups since the upgrades and will continue to optimize code.

*We have removed the javascript page loading progress bar from all portions of FFR*

Cheers,

Synthlight

Experiment X part 2

Tonight we are moving forward with the changes and will be making the switch to Vbulletin from phpbb (security reasons again). The site will be up but the forums may be closed while we convert things and get the basic Vbulletin section up and running. When the forum comes back up, it will be classic Vbulletin style until we decide on a better style.

Cheers,

Synthlight

(also getting rid of the loading bar madness tonight that you see on each page)

LD EDIT: Forums down, see you all in a few hours!
LD EDIT: We’re still workin’ on it, we haven’t forgotten about you! We’ll work into the night to get things up and running again.
LD EDIT: Getting closer, hang in there!
SYNTH EDIT: 2:18am CST. Just a few minutes away!!
LD EDIT: 3:24 EST. We all know that Eastern time owns Central.
SYNTH EDIT: 4:28 EST. The new forum is up! Complete transfer into a new system. The skin is temporary until we get something solid and good in there. If you don’t like it, you can go into your forum control panel and change it to another default. It took 6 straight hours of writing and writing scripts (thanks LD) and importing countless tidbits. You may need to login once originally but if you register on the main site, it transfers over to the new forum automatically. If you were registered previously on the forum, you are still registered. (LD: Also, if you just registered, you’ll need to click the link on the left (In the menu bar) before being able to login on the forums.)

More to come tomorrow… uhh.. I mean today.