As part of an ongoing effort to improve the way that the game is governed, we have made a significant change to the game’s rule structure. As of today the forums are no longer under the oversight of the BSEC. This was done to allow the BSEC to concentrate solely on game issues, their original intended purpose, and to keep the forums more seperate from the game itself, much like the IRC chat room. There is a new ruleset for the forums, which will be enforced by forum moderators. These moderators will have oversight over nearly all of the “community” boards, including the BSEC Gallery, which will be moved out of the BSEC section. However, the Index Managers and BSEC Members will still moderate their own specific sections. We hope this will improve the quality of the forums for all users, and the new rules should clear up previous confusion over what is, and is not, acceptable in the forums.

Tomorrow, Saturday the 17th, the webserver will go down for an indefinate period of time to perform major software upgrades for security and server efficiency issues. The exact time of the maintenance is not yet known, as is the length of time it will take. Please come to IRC (irc.wyldryde.org / #blogshares) during the day for updates as they are available. We will endevor to have the site back as quickly as possible, but as you may know, major upgrades and updates can take some time to complete. Thanks for your patience.

Late last night, finally, we were able to complete the changes to the MSN Spaces URL structure. When you have to modify 8.8 million rows (one row in the blogs table, and another in a special lookup table), it takes a long time – three days to be exact. But thanks to heroic efforts by Rob and Dave, we were able to get it finished. There will most likely be some changes to the spider code soon so that links to the old style URLs will be counted, thus we won’t have to add 4.4 million new entries to the alternative URL table to cover them. Thanks to everyone for all your patience during this time, hopefully we won’t have to do it again!

I just spent the past couple days purging every blog that had a tag in the title from the system. There were over 300 of them, with about 90% being dead. Those that were not dead were fixed to have a text-only title. Once the clean-out was completed, Rob (aka SubWolf) reprogrammed the spiders to ignore any tags from newly added blogs’ titles. Therefore, we should no longer have this problem again. If you happen to ever find any blogs like this still in the system, please send me a PM and I’ll get it taken care of ASAP.
MrP

There was a bit of an uproar about how one dollar weblogs ideas came to be, has a new supply and demand element been added to the game, if this was an attempt to add chaos etc…
Well here’s what happened, the idea generation script wasn’t being run properly cron, I went looking for the cronjob that was supposed to call the script but couldn’t find it.
I then went poking around the admin interface, didn’t find the script, then onto directories on the server in housing all the scripts and found a potential winner.
So
I called the script in my browser, it loads but produces no output…
I called the script again, it times out..
I called the script again, it times out…
I called the script again, I get a server error…
I called the script again, I get a server error…
I called the script again, it loads but produces no output…
I decided to ask Subwolf about when he gets on irc, a few hours later he pops up. Apparently the script only returns output when you specify a verbose mode in a GET var.
And the script made ideas every time it was called, so now we have about a weeks worth of ideas produced in a ten minutes….
I pondered…
Well only thing to do then is to crash the price of the ideas because now the market is so bloody saturated and a little bit of entropy never hurt anyone.
I look at the ideas page again, all the crashed ideas are gone… oh well.