Author Archives: AFDStudios

Hey, everybody,

I’ve got some time out aside for working on HeroMachine site and forum issues — not issues with HeroMachine itself. Please use the comments below to list any bugs you’ve encountered.

Thank you!

PS: This is not for feature requests. I already have a list of those to work on — this thread is specifically for “stuff that isn’t working properly.”

Hi all, it’s been a long time since I chimed in ’round these parts, so I thought I should give everyone a quick update on where things stand here at HeroMachine World Headquarters, also known as my kitchen.

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With the new forums back up and zippier than ever thanks to the Ben the Badass, we’re having a debate about whether they should go full width or remain in the current two-column setup. I’ve kept the side bar because I thought it would be handy to have the list of current contests, recent posts, and common links. But as Ben points out, most forums are full width — if you’re in the forums, you probably aren’t super concerned with the bloggy stuff.

So I figured I’d keep with longstanding HeroMachine traditions and ask — Which do you prefer?

[polldaddy poll=8342774]

Good morning!

Welcome to the new HeroMachine. We know it pretty much looks the same, but we’ve rebuilt the internals of our site from the ground up, including enabling new forums with all the old content imported.

The site is running a lot faster than before, and should be far more stable.

However, there will undoubtedly be bugs. Things to watch out for:

• Your user login may have disappeared. We had to clear out a ton of spam users. If we caught you by accident in the sweep, we’re sorry. Send me a message via the contact form with your username, and I’ll do what I can to re-enable your account.
• Your password may not work. Reset it. 🙂
• You may find threads in the forum claiming they were starting by some strange, mysterious figure called “hmadmin.” The import process wasn’t perfect — pulling in 40,000+ messages took a little over eight hours of processing time by our server, and some stuff was bound to be missed.
• You may find missing images. Please report them to us via the contact form.
• To combat the onslaught of spammers (I literally had two register while I was putting the site back up within minutes of each other), we’ve enabled a CAPTCHA on registration. It seems to work fine; let us know if you have any issues logging in or registering.
• Please report any other bugs or performance issues on this post as a comment, or use the contact form.

We really appreciate everybody’s patience while we upgraded the site, and we hope you all enjoy the shiny new code that’s running it.

Regarding the long down time for the forums, I’m sorry for the extended delay. Ben the Awesome Tech Guy and I both work for the same company for our regular jobs and we’ve had a major project that’s due to launch today. That’s taken up all our time, but I’m hopeful that maybe this weekend we can turn our attention back to the forum issue.

We’ve found a replacement for SimplePress (the current blog software) that we hope will put less of a load on the server. We’ve run one sample import and it looked good but we haven’t had time to really dive into it to make sure, since data integrity and the preservation of peoples’ character images is the most important thing.

Thanks for your patience, I know it’s super frustrating.

Good evening!

We’d very sorry for the unexpected downtime today. We discovered a few areas that were causing massive site slowdowns, the biggest one being the forum software. With hundreds of users and gigabytes of data, we’ve simply outstripped the plugins ability to support our users.

For now, the forums are down. We will be investigating other forum software over the next few days and converting the forums over. Rest assured that all your content has been backed-up.

Please stay tuned for further updates. This is a very high priority issue for us, and we appreciate your patience while we move HeroMachine forward with shiny new software.