I created a little problem back in May. I was tired of deleting spam accounts every day, so I disabled new user registrations completely, rather than send them to be approved by an admin. Previously, we let anyone sign up and verify with an email confirmation. Even CAPTCHA won’t keep a persistent or resourceful programmer from creating accounts.

To the players that talked to Vidalyia about Stormwardens and to those randomly stopping by, please accept my apology. I’m usually a nice guy, I swear! Unfortunately, some admins (*me*) don’t remember that settings have changed and they need to fix them.

If you’re visiting the site and wonder why you can’t reach the forums, it’s because I’ve been working on it and didn’t think to post something here. Yeah, slick move on my part. If you read carefully, you’ll notice in the error message for the forum, there’s a link to the new board. Instead of the old “Forum” link, it’s updated to “Forums“. Not my choice, but there’s a strict “No upgrade in place” problem with the version we used to have. It’ll be ugly until Faileas or I get into a major skinning mode. I’ll postpone some of my leveling to make sure it looks good enough that I’ll want to use it.

After about 24-hours of downtime, it looks like we got the server back on its feet! Thank the gods.

The site went down on Monday at approximately 9am PST/12pm EST due to a loss of power in the data center we are hosted in. This loss of power was due to an escaped mental patient climbing up a power pole near by and shocking himself causing the power company to shut off power so he could be safely removed.

I am not making this up.

Most servers in the data center were up again within about 30-45 minutes of the original shutdown. The server that we are hosted on was the only one that decided to “experience further issues” and had to be restored from backups. Unfortunately, it seems that the restore didn’t actually restore anything for us. They had to do a second restore from a failing hard drive, start up the database, fix FTP, fix networking issues, and restore the lost email accounts (which, as of now, is still in progress, so Don still has no email).

Hopefully this is the most excitement we’ll have in a while.

In addition, patch 3.2 went live this morning, so don’t forget to read up on the new patch notes! Lots of interesting changes including the new Argent Coliseum dungeon and raid, Isle of Conquest battleground, lower level requirements for mount skills, Druid form revamps, Shaman totem bar, and lots of other interesting changes.

I’m sure Faileas will post something more, but know that we’re actively getting things into the right state.  A Florida mental patient got loose and electrocuted, causing our site to go down. We’ll have the link and more info in a while.

Kill as many zombies as you can!  The Scourge must be stopped!

There are several phases to the invasion and Necrotic Runes are back.  Too bad I destroyed some a long time ago to get bank space.  I also hope to see true adventurers taking down the new power (new boss) in Karazhan.

Also, I’ve updated parts of the backend of the website.  If you notice odd things, tell Faileas.  I tried to fix it.  She gets to clean up any mess.