Thanks kindly ... game cancelled.

In the middle of what was an interesting live game:
"Database version 1.43 and code version 1.42 don't match, and no auto-update script is available for this version. Please wait while the admin runs update.sql"
then
"The site is currently undergoing some maintenance and may be unstable. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes"
then
"Dear users. It has come to our attention that due to the recent site outage, a number of people NMR'd in this game. As a result, we will be cancelling this in the next few minutes. We apologise for the inconvenience caused"

Lame

This site's administration puts forth such an effort into sanitize these forums to only contain viewpoints consistent with their political biases, going so far as to censure posts that don't conform to them. To bad this site's administration doesn't make a better effort to avoid instances like what I just quoted above. Dan was recently wondering why more live games can't get started here ... now I think he sees an example of why. It's because the administration staff cares more about their politics than they do about the Diplomacy game itself. Not at all in line with zultar's stated goal of this being "the best place to play Diplomacy online". zultar should modify his slogan into "the best place for chatting if DO approves of your politics online, with Diplomacy as an after-thought"

@wpfieps,

The way the site forum was currently designed was never meant to scale, which lead to the entire site crashing on a regular basis. To fix this a large number of game data and forum data had to be archived at various points, which was unacceptable in the sites desire to keep site history for everyone to enjoy.

So over the past few weeks Kestas (the site founder) has been working on modifications that improved the site forum, eliminating the database strain it placed on the site and on game processing. Today, a new mobile design to streamline playing games and using the site on phones was introduced.

Unfortunately these changes do occasionally result in down time, such as today. But that is cost of us never asking you for money to play, the cost of no in site advertisements, and no paywalls on features.

This is a completely free to play site, so when new improvements are added it can be a little rough, but the improvements made today to the mobile view and the forum are absolutely net improvements to the site.

So while I understand your frustration with the cancellation of a live game, there really is no other recourse there. And blaming that on forum moderation is absolutely absurd and doesn't make any sense.

What would be appropriate is thanking Zultar for arranging for the implementation of a new mobile site, a new forum, and at 0 cost to you.

Please note that I am not a part of the moderator team and my views are my own.

Cheers.

" zultar should modify his slogan into "the best place for chatting if DO approves of your politics online, with Diplomacy as an after-thought""

Yeah I've got the mod team whipped. Totally.

The mod team spends about 1% of its time on the forum. Why do you think it's such a shit hole?

The devs took time to make improvements to the site today. Get over yourself.

"never asking you for money to play, the cost of no in site advertisements" is rare, and appreciated. I'm new here, but so far it looks like things run smoothly. On sites with a community as large as this one and as many complex features as this one, that usually means there's a lot of generally unappreciated and uncompensated going on.

Dan

Didn’t know Wp was a loon. I’ll have to watch out for him and bookmark him. I’ll put him above KansasBoyd and below Capt_Brad

I was going to solo this game, so I'm disappointed too. I strongly disagree with wpfieps though.

Whether Zultar deserves wp's thanks for the new features would no doubt depend upon whether they offer any improvement. I have no doubt that there is considerable benefit for many members (huzzah!), but for some of us they're a pain in the arse. The browser that I've been using on my mobile that was previously fantastic for this site is now essentially unusable. This has been offset for me by a considerable improvement in Chrome, so aside for a short inconvenience I am no worse off. Not yet, anyway :p.

But all that aside, there's a pretty obvious lesson to be learned here. When engaging in some pretty major site tinkering let people know in advance, or turn off live games if it's easier, to avoid buggering up people's evenings. As much as it doesn't justify all of wp's comments by any stretch, it was pretty careless and people being peeved is perfectly understandable.

Yes, I think lessons have been learned here.

If I remember there was a banner ad that literally said the site would be down for an amount of time. I probably wouldn’t have scheduled a live game that day.

Oct - if you really don't like the mobile site, you can revert it by requesting the desktop site. On android you can do this by hitting the button with three dots at the top right and selecting 'Request Desktop Site.'

@ captainmeme

Would that it were so simple. The request desktop option is painfully ineffective on numerous devices, as the vDip experience demonstrated. I believe that's why they bothered to create the opt-out. But as I say, for the time being on of my browsers is working nicely for me. It could be that other members are less fortunate.

CommanderByron: as soon as the maintenance banner went up, I cancelled every live nopress game I had created. Unfortunately, I couldn't cancel this one, because other people had joined. Next time, I'll ask a mod to cancel the game for me.

Btw, the previous evening, our live press game had a different bug: at one point in the game, people started cursing, and I figured out why: my saved moves suddenly disappeared, and I had to reenter them just before the deadline. Has anyone else seen this bug, or was that just unannounced site maintenance?

@dank - that wasn’t a dig at you. That was @Octavious since he said “let people know in advance” which I was pointing out the site absolutely did.

I agree with Octavious. I'm trying to use that desktop thing but everything is the wrong font size and using this site on mobile has suddenly become horrific.