Twilight Forums

Sometime this morning I stopped receiving bug reports and messages from the forums when people sign up. Both of these are automated email senders, so I'm not quite sure what's going on, but right now it acts like email is being sent but it isn't. I'm looking into this.

I think something like this happened to KoL once, and I wish I could remember what the problem was.

Could it be a side effect of the server getting hammered? The daemon (do they still use these?) might be lagging out and not trying again.

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The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

I, also, would guess that it's a side effect of the server being hammered. Alas, I know very little about programming, and don't have a clue how one would fix such as this.

Good luck though.

I dunno. Could be, though that sounds fishy because it's not just some email, it's EVERY email since about 9 a.m. that was generated by a form. (Donation confirmations from PayPal and regular email work just fine.) I sent in a support request. And as mentioned elsewhere I'm looking at more/better servers to see if that helps.

Also:



Yes. Absolutely. As of today you're elite all right.

Might it be worth attempting to send the mail through a third party SMTP server instead of relying on Sendmail on your server?

If the server is being hammered, it's likely to effect sendmails performance (Unless you are already managing the mail elsewhere)

Also, it might be worth checking with your ISP / Whoever hosts your email to check out that it's not being blocked there. Chances are you are receiving a lot of extra email, all probably coming from the same address, and all flagged as being script generated. It could be that they think they are saving you from someone flooding your mailbox or something.

Good news and bad news. The good news is a whole ton of yesterday's email came through sometime last night, meaning it wasn't lost, just slowed down. So I will get bug reports and forum subscriptions eventually.

The bad news is those things are all likely to be pretty slow to arrive for the next few days, assuming things stay busy. It's unfortunate, but probably acceptable--I'm just going to be slow to respond to things for a while.

Hmm. Maybe what you need is someone to sort through all those emails and bug reports and such. *innocent grin*

Actually, that's not a bad way to look at this in more of an abstract sense.

If instead of relying on email you set yourself up some kind of intranet system that would handle bug requests and forum signups. Imagine it as a little private forum. Instead of email this stuff to yourself, you just dump it in a database. As it would not run off a que, it would always be up to date, and would allow you to flag items as resolved etc.

A final advantage to this system, is as your game expands and you add more developers to your team, you will already have a suitable bug tracking system in place, rather than having to remember to pass these reports off to appropriate people etc.

You could always segregate it to lets say, allow forum moderators to view the pending accounts page so that they could approve them etc.

Yeah, I'd definitely pick up someone to handle the forum stuff for you, in exchange for like, a custom in-game item or something after a few months. Like in KoL, Jick and Skully have almost nothing to do with the actual management of the forums. That's all on aelf.