bugs

Any new bots. This bot that I've had logged in for about an hour now is working, but trying to log in any new bots ends up with a blank screen, while in the online list they show up as "looking at insurance policies."

Just posted this news item, sorry about that:

Please accept my humble apologies for the rare outage(ish) tonight from about 12am-2am. The server ran out of disk space and caused all sorts of things to go wonky. The immediate problem of having no disk space is now fixed, but there may be strange unintended side effects of this where things have gotten into an inconsistent state because something couldn't be written, so please be on the lookout for anything unusual and report it in the bug forum if you see something. I need to either purchase more disk space or start throwing out logs...

From the documentation page:

Disk space: 458.5 MB

How come it's so small anyway?

That stat is a little misleading - you're actually looking at free disk space, not total. That being said, the total is only 20GB because the game just runs on a simple vps.

a lot of companies offer 'unlimited' hosting (no limitations on storage/bandwidth)... maybe that should be looked into

Powweb is unlimited :)

When you say delete logs? What do ya mean.

any company that offers unlimited hosting isnt worth using... chances are they overload their servers

"Unlimited" hosting resources doesn't mean you don't have to ever worry about running out and is unfortunately just a marketing gimmick. What's actually happening is that the company is leveraging the fact that most people won't use that many resources, so if you happen to end up using too much, you'll kindly be requested to find a new host (or not so kindly and just shut off). My host, linode.com, is actually one of the more reputable vps hosts out there and I'm quite happy with them. I don't believe the game has ever had an outage that wasn't caused by me and the server has had year+ long uptimes in the past (at 252 days right now). And since it's a vps host, I have 100% control of the server and can do a lot of things I wouldn't be able to do on a more basic host like powweb (edmazur.com is hosted on powweb, so I'm familiar with them).

As for deleting logs, I mean access logs, database backups, etc. It was the daily database backup being written at 12:05am that caused the server to run out of space. These daily backups have grown quite large and are probably the most likely candidate to be thrown out. There's just part of me that hates throwing out data though, so maybe I'll just invest in a personal 1TB disk and transfer them here, or upload them to Amazon S3, or something else.

I always imagined you had a secondary computer running the server.

Why not keep the back up daily, and just have it keep the most recent few months?

Meh, get a 2 or 3Tb HDD (they're are so freaking cheap these days) and do the old "video footage" adage. Save everything until it fills up then begin copying over the oldest first with the newest and continue until the game dies or you decide to remove it.

Yeah, I don't really need daily database backups from over a year ago (which I sadly do have). I keep telling myself to hold onto them in case I ever want to use them to backfill some sort of bot history feature or something.

The innate lust for recording all information possible and protecting that cache of knowledge is the very quality that will eventually put the human race on the road to becoming Gods. Do not feel ashamed Ender!

you can but seagate 2tb hard drives for only about $100 nowadays

You might even say I have an interest in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful...

you don't?! :O

Google<3

oh google... you never cease to amuse me :P