FicWad: fresh-picked original and fan fiction

If you can see this, the move is done.

Some of you may see it hours before others do. That's DNS propagation for you.

I'm going to do it tonight. FicWad will go down for several hours. It'll come back up (a) when all the data is moved, and (b) when the DNS changes I make propagate fully.

I will soon have to put FicWad into a read-only mode for a little while so I can migrate its database to a different host. (It's a slow thing. Dump a backup of gigabytes and gigabytes of database, scp them to a different server, import the backup.)

Translation: FicWad will experience a period of non-interactivity which will last several hours at some point in the next few days. Enjoy.

FicWad has been majorly down today because something about the DreamHost process killer has gone absolutely mental. For whatever reason, it's killing anything run by the ficwad-website user, which (a) makes the site go down, and (b) makes it impossible for me to get into the site to work out why.

So, as a quick fallback I've migrated FicWad to a different user. Things will mostly work, though we'll build up a backlog of notification emails to be sent out. I'm waiting on a response from DreamHost support before I turn that stuff back on.

In other news, my ongoing policy of benign neglect continues apace. (Well, that's not quite true. I've been tinkering with a rewrite for a while now, and might actually get around to testing it before too long. I'm mentioning it here to shame me into actually doing so. We'll see if that works.)

As you may, possibly, have noticed, I've been completely ignoring FicWad for a while now, and some things have gone unfixed.

The biggest problem is that email-sending died a while ago, so no-one was getting signup emails or new passwords or whatnot. Turns out that this was because FicWad's hosting provider accidentally disabled the email account in question during some sort of maintenance. I've fixed that, and the backed up email queue is getting processed.

The problem with "everything is getting sent back out" is that there's a big backlog. If you signed up and then asked for a new password because you never got your password email... you'll get the signup email, and then (later) the actual working password.

I'm sorry about that. It may take a few days, but eventually everything will show up, and you'll be in possession of the correct account details.

I've added a very minimal editor to the story page -- just a few buttons to let you bold/italic/whatever bits of your story, and a preview panel.

If anyone has any problems with this, let me know.

Sorry about last night's downtime (all those "died while connecting to database" messages). Our hosting provider did a data center move, and I didn't pay enough attention to their email telling me about it.

I made sure the webserver wasn't on the list, but the database server? Shame on me.

"What are email notifications?"

They've actually been enabled for about two hours now, during which time I noticed that it was kind of spammy without an editing delay for stories. So now the notifications won't go out for a few minutes after you update the story, giving you time to find and fix that one comma.

The very valid complaints about rating being somewhat broken have been resolved, I do believe.

I've refilled everyone's rating points. Go forth, my subjects, and tell stories what you think of them!

Rating points had been not refilling, and I had been at a loss to work out why.

Turns out my eyes were skimming over a typo all along. (".sh" instead of ".py" -- who knew?)