Forums! The Musical

Just in case someone's wondering why the game is down for maintenance longer than normal and hasn't read today's updates...

There is some urgent maintenance I need to do on the database and I have no option but to keep the game offline while I do it. Trying to do it while the game's online would make the game so slow as to be unplayable anyway, and might result in corruption of the entire database, whioch I doubt anybody wants.

As a result, intermission will be a LOT longer than normal tonight. I'm estimating 2 hours but it might be more or less depending on how the server behaves.

UPDATE: Everything looked like it was going well, but at the last minute... well, I have to restore the backup from just before intermission and start again after tweaking some database config settings. Hopefully second time's a charm. Sorry but the game's going to have to stay offline until it's finished or until I give up in disgust and go back to the drawing board.

Nothing much to add. Still working on it and will get the game back up asap.

Looks like it's going to be at LEAST another hour, thanks to a nice little MySQL gotcha that meant I had to start over. Fortunately, my obsessive backup behaviour means no data's been lost, it's just slow and tedious. And trust me, however tedious it is for you, it's at least 57 billion times tediouserer for me.

The cursor goes blink... blink... blink... blink... blink... blink...

Four hours after intermission finished and we're nearly there. I'm just running a complete scan/repair on the database (sort of like defrag and chkdsk combined) to make sure there are absolutely no corruption issues and then we'll be back online.

OK, everything's fine and the game's back online!

Except I just realised I had to restore back to the pre-intermission database backup, so now I have to run the intermission script again. It'll be back up in a couple of minutes.

No further updates should need to be posted so don't wait for them.