Today's outage and some other stuff

15 September 2016

With much help from Nexcess, things are now resolved.  Apparently, someone was attempting either a DDoS or a hack, neither of which was ultimately successful.  Nexcess will be monitoring for unusual activity, and manta2g is adding further security layers to the code.

I'm 90% complete with data restore in the comics subdomain.

For stories where the chapters didn't quite convert right (it's a long and involved process as to why, so I'll not bore you), you'll see black diamonds with question marks in them instead of punctuation.  To temporarily fix this, set the encoding in your browser to Windows-1252.  This will make the punctuation display.  We are manually going through and fixing all these chapters, so that the conversion to utf8 is finally completed.

Happy Almost Fall!

September 4, 2016

Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive.

Software Upgrade

The Comics chapter table

Site Header/Logo Image

Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales

Funding Status

Deletion notification

Disposable email

Email address visibility

Tech Bits

To see the full news post, click the link for more!!!

PHP core upgrade

Upgrading the core of PHP to 5.6 within the next day or so

Happy 4th of July!

July 3, 2016

Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive.

Software Upgrade

Site Header/Logo Image

Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales

Funding Status

Deletion notification

Disposable email

Email address visibility

Tech Bits

click the link for full news!

The Road to Progress!

Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive.

Software Upgrade

New/returned features

Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales

Funding Status

Deletion notification

Disposable email

Email address visibility

Newly published!

Tech Bits

Click for details!!!

Site will be slow for 30 to 60 minutes

MAJOR Software updates! (Yes, read only mode is done!)

Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive.

MAJOR Software Update

• Turn anonymous reviews on or off

• Tags are now in their own area

• Summaries can now be up to 600 characters long.

• Can add up to two other authors as co-authors

• Contributed chapters (round robins) can be edited by their author.

• New story manager

• File uploads of any kind in the archive is disabled

I can add categories again!!!!

I expect I'll be busy with adding the things that have been asked of me since the ability to do so was suspended for this part of the rewrite.

Comics Subdomain issues

Donations

Please remember that the authors you read do like to hear from you! Leave them a review or two, and let them know how they're doing!

DemonGoddess061

Click the link for details! You know you wanna!

READ ONLY mode and other things

Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive.

Current Reading List

This has been updated to display the last time an author updated a story you're following. So, click your current reading list, and see who's updated!

Database Character Conversion

As anyone who goes into the comics subdomain knows, I've been having terrible issues with this particular chapter table. I FINALLY got it to convert, and convert properly, so I'll now be able to go in and fix all the records that were truncated because they were corrupted to begin with.

READ ONLY Mode

The archive will be put in READ ONLY mode on the 24^th and 25^th of this month, for parts of each day. This is so manta2g can do a MAJOR software update. What this means is that while the site is in read only mode, you cannot login, add or edit anything.

Funding Status

Introducing, the donation kitty! For years, I disabled a direct button/link to donate, as for a very long time, there was fund raising via “let's push the panic button”. So I made it very low key for a long time. Understand that donations are NEVER required, but they sure do help! If you've used the kitty to donate, and want to be added to the supporter's page, please do email with your pen name, so I can do that.

Deletion notification

For Accounts

When deleting an account because the user is underage, a plagiarist, or whatever else would be a reason to delete one entirely, we do NOT send a notification.

For Stories

When deleting stories, this is done for non compliance with the ToS. Stories are HIDDEN long before they are deleted. The user is told there is an issue, and given 7 days to comply before the story is hidden. Upon hiding, the story is left for 30 or more days (it ends up being more when I have a heavy work load IRL) before it is deleted. If the issue is CORRECTED, the story is restored to public view.

Disposable email

Disposable emails are not checked, and we don’t allow registration with them. Upon finding an account registered with a disposable email address, it is deleted.

Disabling anonymous reviews

As a matter of course, while the authors cannot choose this for themselves, anon reviews are enabled on a daily basis. If you don’t WANT to have this enabled, email at technicalsupport@adult-fanfiction.org with a link to your profile, and a subject line of “disable anon reviews”. Bear in mind that when I do this, as this is controlled by the profile, ALL your stories will then require that a user be logged in to leave a review.

Please remember that the authors you read do like to hear from you! Leave them a review or two, and let them know how they're doing!

DemonGoddess061

Archive Read Only Schedule

2-16-16

CHARACTER SET CONVERSION COMPLETE!

I've revised my schedule, because my RL work schedule is amping up.  To ensure I get this done as quickly as possible, I'll be putting the archive in to READ ONLY mode every day for approximately 4 hours at a time.

For today:  

3 pm EST to 7 pm EST - done
2-14 - 3 pm EST to 7 pm EST - done
2-15 - 6 pm EST to 9 pm EST
2-16 - 6 pm EST to 9 pm EST

Because I ran so much of the clean up queries yesterday, I expect for the character set conversions themselves to go more smoothly than they have been, as well as more quickly.

The Monday through Friday times will start at 6 pm as I've stated above.  I honestly do NOT expect this to take longer than tomorrow, but we'll see.  I will do this every day until I am finished.

When I get to the final phase, where the conversion has been checked and I'm ready to switch tables, I do delete the old table and rename the new converted ones.  This takes approximately 3 to 5 minutes altogether, where you won't see any data AT ALL in the subdomain where I'm doing this.  In other words, all blank pages, not the white page of doom, but there is no data to draw FROM while I do this last part.  If you do see that, be patient, it'll be back up within a few minutes.  Each table set takes a minimum of 45 minutes to convert and then check, so I might not get all the ones listed above done.  

Of course, the 45 minutes is based on the last set of tables I did, where I ran in to issues and had to come up with fixes.  So, it could very well take less time this time around.  I won't know until I actually do it.  Now that I know for certain the oddball side effects that this conversion causes, I also know what to do to fix it all before I even make the tables live.  That will certainly speed it up.

UPDATE below the cut!!

REMINDER