NationStates News

by Max Barry
Tue, 27 Dec 2022

I'm not sure if you noticed but the site was unavailable for four and a half days just there. It wasn't great, to be honest. Here's the story:

What's Working

Almost everything should be back and working fine, with no data loss.

What's Not Working

• Trading Cards bids & asks: The major casualty of this episode, apart from the sleep and sanity of admins, is bids and asks on Trading Cards. We're not able to safely restore these. This means you will need to re-set any bids and asks you had before.

What's Different

We kicked back the Cease To Exist (CTE) timer: for a limited time, nations now cease to exist after 35 days of inactivity, not 28.

We temporarily suspended processing of World Assembly resolutions and proposals, so some of those are still there even though voting should have closed. This will resume in about 48 hours.

What Went Wrong

We scheduled downtime to replace a disk at end-of-life. We took a backup of the relevant system, powered down, and our host attempted to clone the disk. We then had a glorious 30-minute period where everything was running again, before we lost power and experienced a hard crash.

Since then, we've been piecing together data from various sources & backups. This was challenging because they were in different states.

What Might Be Weird

Some things were skipped, because they weren't running during downtime: There were no daily updates, no World Assembly resolution passing, no inactivity warning emails, and so on. This will get back to normal soon.

Thank You For Your Patience

Thanks for standing by, and welcome back!

A huge shout-out to our admins, especially The Royal Confederacy of Eluvatar, for the back-breaking toil of getting this site breathing again. If it was up to me, I would have just rolled everything back two weeks and it would have been chaos. Thank Eluvatar it's not like that.

Update: Due to popular demand! You can help buy Eluvatar dinner.