Category: maintenance

I got an email this morning noting that my blog was taking “forever” to load a single post.

A quick check, and I found that it was running 70x overloaded, due to a vast number of spammers trying (and, in every case, failing) to submit wordpress comment-spam.

No spams will get through, because wordpress is set to only allow comments from people who’ve commented before – that’s a chicken-egg scenario that spammers can’t escape. (I wonder. Would the scourge that is “wordpress comment-spam” be reduced easily, instantly if Automattic (the people that make WordPress) had this as the default?).

…but at 2,000+ spammers a day, it was bringing the virtual site down. Server was fine, but I had the site limited precisely so that *it* would die instead of the server, in cases like this.

Now we’re going to try something new, since Automattic’s Akismet is pretty much useless these days. Anti-Spam, let’s see how you do…

T-Machine.org is up for renewal, Joker.com won’t accept credit and debit cards any more, so I’m having to remote pull everything to a new host. Hopefully this will work first time, without screw-ups…

(Joker.com doesn’t take any other form of payment – PayPal, bank transfer, etc. They used to do plain Credit/Debit, until recently (that’s now been removed) when they switched to the “insecure password and spam email account” system that Visa/Mastercard are pushing)

This Visa/Mastercard system is not only a joke, it’s also a great way to lose business: moving to the new system just cost Joker.com a 5+ year customer – and I’d have continued to be a customer for decades to come, I’m sure. Web 0.1 triumphs again …

…but I’m only just finally recovering from the second chest infection + lost voice from GDC.

Also, if you were expecting an email from me at any point in the past 6 weeks and haven’t received it yet, that’s why.

In case you missed it, due to some incompetence / deliberate nastiness from Google, I’m being forced to pre-emptively move the RSS feed for this site. Sorry.

New URL (you should change now, or you won’t receive any more posts in your RSS reader) is:

http://t-machine.org/index.php/feed/

Hey, guys, I need some help!

Feedburner will be removed from the internet in 20 days time, which means I will no longer have an RSS feed.

Because of the way Google works (they do not allow multiple Google accounts to be simultaneously signed-in on the same computer), it will be physically impossible for me to use the “replacement” service from Google (I believe google thought this out very carefully indeed, and is very well aware of the consequences, but I won’t hit you with the conspiracy theory today :) ).

(and, in case you hadn’t noticed, Google has forcibly removed some of the features from Feedburner in the process, including the single most valuable one – the count of how many people are accessing your site through RSS)

Worst case scenario, I’ll go back to wordpress-managed feed, but someone with a misconfigured feed reader killed wordpress the last time I had that on, so I’m not sure how long it will stay up. I could install a cache server purely to cover the RSS feed, but that’s going to be a bunch of hassle I could do without (and I might well get it wrong, it’s been a while since I’ve configured Squid). I’ve looked at the WordPress Cache plugins, but they all have major incompatibilities / conflicts with other common plugins.

So … if I can’t find a replacement before 28 February 2009, the RSS feed may well magically disappear. Suggestions greatly appreciated!

Thanks for everyone who voted in the survey (What topics do you want to read more about?) – very helpful.

You can help by rating the posts from now on whenever you see one that you greatly prefer / greatly dislike (I’ve added a plugin that lets you rate each post from 1 star to 5 stars without reloading the page or having to login etc).

Your top votes:

• MMO operations issues / running online games (80%)
• MMO programming (75%)
• MMO design issues / inventing online games (75%)

So, you all want to know more about how to make and then run an MMO, huh? :)

But … don’t want any more Casual MMO analysis (15%) nor anything to do with Social Networking (5%), even though MMOs are really the world’s most advanced Social Networks and depend upon it for their revenue. Interesting.

So, I guess this reflects an interest in more of the MMORPG / $50 million budget side of the MMO industry? a.k.a. “how do you even spend that much money in a sensible way”?

A few generic areas there I’ve long been meaning to write about:

• Mistakes in MMO design
• Mistakes in MMO programming
• Classic (and not-so-classic) MMO server architectures
• What “running an MMO” looks like (staff, job roles, hardware, software, processes)
• Better ways of running an MMO (mostly: different approaches to process and to software)

Is that along the right lines? If not, let me know (comment on this post, or grab my email from the About page) – suggestions / requests welcome too, although do that for information only, don’t expect me to automatically fulfil them!

And, as mattb pointed out, there’s at least one person wanting more on Component / Entity Systems. That’s tricky. The ES posts so far took a very long time to write (contrary to what some people have said, an awful lot of research and cross-checking went into them, in an attempt to clarify what has historically been a very murky and poorly-described subject, and prone to confusion and misinformation). Until recently it also looked like I was going to have an opportunity to see another ES go into production for a major MMO, and I was hoping to wait and see how that went before coming back to the topic. That ain’t going to happen now, which leaves me with several directions I could go in. Feedback needed, guys – what needs saying that isn’t already said? I’ve got one interesting post left that explains the whole “Future of MMO” part (although I think it’s pretty obvious already what that will contain), but I’m sure there’s a lot more advice and thoughts I could throw out if there’s specific areas people are looking at (except not source code – I’ve tried blogging source before, this is the wrong medium for that).

A missing ” killed it. I *do* have the “correct missing tags in XML” box checked in wordpress, but apparently it doesnt go as far as to check one of the most common typos. Sigh. Would all be OK if they had a working text editor that allowed you to put source code in your posts, but they don’t, so everything has to be hand-edited in HTML. Anyway, fixed now! Sorry!

Hard disk failure. The nice people at Bytemark got a new hard disk installed within a couple of hours, and I had practically everything backed-up, but the restore process turned out to be harder than I expected.

In particular I’ll mention (because it was the only one I couldn’t solve on my own – wordpress authors don’t seem to be logging error messages for catastrophic WordPress failures, I’m not sure why!) – WordPress displayed a blank page for every URL because if WordPress can’t find the theme it thinks it’s using, it silently – no errors, no messages, no hints – just displays blank pages everywhere. Not even any HTML. And I had forgotten I was using a custom theme that I hadn’t restored :) – doh!.

Also, for some reason the last 3 weeks of posts are missing. I was sure I had a backup from last week that should have had them, so I will continue to investigate.

(just because it’s brilliant, and I wanted to say thank you)

Still using Akismet? Why?

You do know that Akismet rejects genuine posts, don’t you? Sure, it’s not its fault – spam filtering is hard.

But since Spam Karma is free, integrates easily with WordPress, and offers much safer filtering of spam, with multiple levels of fallback, isn’t it time to try an upgrade?

…please claim my blog. Here is my Technorati Profile