Site Maintenance

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I’ve implemented a “reCAPTCHA” check on the new user registration page, and re-enabled autonomous creation of new accounts (I was getting tired of manually sifting through the new user registrations - currently about 50 bots a day try to sign up - and waiting for me to see the email is a rubbish experience for real new users, especially if I don’t immediately recognise their account is a genuine one). Please let me know if you have any additional issues with the login pages, and especially if you see any spam comments or articles managed to get through.

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If you can see this message, then you’re viewing worldofsam on its new home at pinkstuff II! The old server was getting on for ten years old (it’s a Pentium2!) and we’d seen some hardware unreliability lately, so it was only a matter of time before my sites would have to move house.

In an ideal world this would all happen quietly behind the scenes and you wouldn’t notice any difference…

In practice there are a whole bunch of grubby differences - largely due to now running on a more recent version of PHP which has taken a dislike to the (rather old) version of drupal on which this site is based. I’m trying to fix issues as and when I can identify them (mostly by applying a patch from a later drupal version), unfortunately as this site relies quite heavily on some custom field types to the the flexinode module (which was deprecated, rewritten, and folded into drupal core with an incompatible API within a year of starting up the site) this means I need to find and apply individual patches since upgrading wholesale to drupal 7 would pretty much require rewriting the site from scratch.

Please let me know (email might be best) if you see any issues, especially relating to logins (I’ve patched one session handling problem [92802]). Also, I already know that:

A whole bunch of the administrator pages are showing up blank, but that shouldn’t affect anyone but me…

Image handling is not properly reinstalled yet, so uploading title images or screenshots will not generate thumbnails correctly Fixed.

Note that the URL will show up as “worldofsam.intensity.org.uk” for a little while. I’ll change this back to worldofsam.org after a few days when its likely that the DNS change has propagated. Should be back to normal now.

The edit-user page doesn’t appear to work (“php: Parameter 2 to user_user() expected to be a reference, value given”), so I can’t approve new accounts or block existing slightly-spamming ones… Fixed in module.inc

I consistently seem to get logged out after editing a content page which someone else last edited.

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The server host will be down for a few hours in the early hours of tomorrow morning, for power systems maintenance. Hopefully everything will be back to normal by 08:00.

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Due to increasing spam problems, I have had to disable anonymous comments and will be manually verifying new account registrations. Apologies for the inconvenience.

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Sorry, looks like something in the site stopped working when the server's PHP subsystem was upgraded from version 4 to version 5. All the pages are safely stored, but the system is failing to display them properly. I'm working on fixing it.

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There will be a short period of down-time on September 3rd when pinkstuff, the computer which hosts this site and various others, is driven from London down the M4 to Maidenhead.

There may, separately and later, be some more disruption when we switch to a cheaper hosting package, as this will probably involve a change of IP address on the server. Old DNS entries may remain cached for several days: when the server moves, www2.worldofsam.org will point to the new location in case you have temporary difficulty reaching the usual address.

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This site is not about piracy.

If a file is not approved for download, that’s because we don’t have permission from the appropriate copyright holders yet. If you want to help, the right way is to go and search out their contact details, and ask for permision.

Putting the files on your own webspace and adding a download link from this page? That is the wrong way to help.

Now what you put on your own site is your own business. But what goes on worldofsam is my business, and if pages appear to promote piracy then it puts the whole thing at risk. I have removed the links - please do not do that again.

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I’ve just noticed that the entries I put in the other day are not searchable or appear in ‘Related Items’ since the pinkstuff server rebuild.

Also it may (or may not) be a good time to ask about the possibility of the ‘Related Items’ search doing a ‘firstword AND secondword’ type search rather than a ‘firstword OR secondword’?

/me ducks

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Apologies for the downtime.

The computer which hosts worldofsam.org suffered a hardware failure (the CD drive suddenly went bananas, and was spreading enough rubbish on the IDE bus to disrupt communication with the hard disk. As a result the boot filesystem was corrupted beyond feasible recovery, and we installed a new replacement Ubuntu, containing new versions of all the software - meaning that every service has had to be checked in turn to ensure the configuration is compatible with the update).

There was no damage to the database files nor the images archive. All parts of worldofsam should now be working normally, so please email me if you find something which isn’t.

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Due to an outbreak of comment spam, I have implemented a simple CAPTCHA process for unregistered users. Anonymous comments are still allowed, but before comments can be posted you must prove you’re not an automaton by typing the requested word into the box provided.

This change does not affect logged-in registered users.