Hala

Updated e-mail domain ban lists, banned more spammers found in known spammer databases. Banned more spammers that used the Signature field of the profile. Inspected more suspected spammers. Thank you to the moderators keeping up with reports. The tools we have aren't perfect (would prefer one click ...

I have changed the New User post limit to an undisclosed number to prevent access to certain permissions. These days only the most sophisticated bots that require a bot runner's interaction can get in here. And they do, more so than I'd like. These new settings should give us a better chance of forc...

For the last few years, new user registrations on this website have been required to go through admin activation. With the latest updates to phpBB, we are now able to use reCaptcha V2 ("I am not a robot"). Sadly, it does not yet support V3, so some spammers still get through. To counter this last bi...

As part of this forum update, I have been taking the time to clear out all of the 50,000+ inactive users. 99% of which were spambots, with only a few being old accounts that were just never ever used. This had to be done initially 500 at a time, then finally 900 at a time as I tested the query limit...

Forum update is complete. This site is now running phpBB 3.2.8 on PHP 7.2. The default Style is prosilver A darker version: Prosilver (Dark Edition) And a cleaner version: prosilver Special Edition You can change your style by clicking your username and selecting User Control Panel. In there select ...

***Original Message*** The hosting provider I use is forcing the upgrade to PHP 7.2 any day/moment now. I was investigating the upgrade path yesterday when I broke the live forums on accident, when intending to test on a dev copy first. Long story short, it was 12 hours of hell yesterday getting the...

At around 5:30am the servers went down. When the others came back up, Phoenix (database) did not. A quick investigation revealed a bad power supply that was just waiting for the next power cycle to not turn back on. We were prepared for something like this and kept a spare power supply on hand. We n...

The DSL is back up and we rearranged our service to drop the phone number, drop the bill cost and increase the bandwidth.

I am swapping the servers back onto the DSL today.

The previous report regarding this situation was here.

Sorry about the new outage this morning. This one is completely out of my hands this time. There is some issue in the neighborhood that keeps knocking out our power and the cable internet with it and by that I do not mean that our modems are going down. I mean that our modems aren't even getting sig...

Ysgard/Hala and Tairis are up. Vaultster remains to be tested, but ought to work. I'll test it here in the next few minutes. It turned out I did need Avlis' help troubleshooting the Alpha connection, but in the end the problem was here. The modem had gotten reset and was no longer in bridged mode. S...

At around 5pm today both of our internet services (cable and DSL) went out at about the same time. We have restored the cable service, but are still working on the DSL. The game servers are hosted on the DSL.

I will update here and Discord when I have more information.

Sometime over the next month or two I am planning to update the phpBB forum software that we use here. Many of you may have noticed that I had to switch new registrations to Admin approval. This was done because we were getting absolutely flooded with spambots no matter what I did with the counterme...

I am aware of the issue, and am working on it. Guys, please, I don't need 6 different sources reporting the same thing. I got a ping on IRC, a report in IRC, a message on Discord, a PM here, this post here, and even people reporting in the Avlis chats where it doesn't belong. Now that said, I realiz...

EDIT: Poseidon is rebooted and the servers are back up fresh. I am rebooting Poseidon for maintenance (and troubleshooting) reasons. It has been up for an awfully long time. Poseidon has been up for 311 days, 21 hours so far. Server processes were at 458 hours. I have left Hala running until it cle...

Both Hala and Ysgard are back online now.