by GL_Support, 3 days ago
Greetings Everyone,
On Saturday evening there was a fire in the office building that houses our development offices. No one was hurt in the fire and the fire didn't reach our offices directly, but the heat damage, water damage and the general damage to the building means we are looking for new office space. None of our live servers were effected in the least by this since they are offsite. We haven't lost any development data either.
At this time we're fully operational with our servers in data centers in the midwest and other parts of the world and we are working from home. This is a major benefit of being a high tech company. Phone support should be back up once I get the number forwarded. Our support system, and email, are housed fully offsite and are fully available to us. We're going to have to delay this week's release as we'll be busy reestablishing the office. When I have more info about our move I will let you all know and I'll post some pictures of the new place.
Please smile and wave to a Firemen when you see them, they do an incredible job day in and day out that thankfully most people don't have experience with. They helped us tremendously by keeping the fire away from our offices and their professionalism after the fact was top notch.
-Stephen
by GL_Support, 5 days ago
Jun, the new developer we brought on a few weeks ago, has been hard at work replacing our current databse backup process with a new one. His work is now complete and as of today we are turning off the morning daily maintenance and replacing it with a new process that requires no daily downtime. Instead we will have a slightly longer process 1 day a week.
We will still need a weekly process to perform a full backup. We will take the site down for about 1 hour on Wednesday mornings and run our backups and database optimization scripts all at one time. This new process not only requires no daily downtime, but should be even faster to recover in the event that we need to do so. We will still have the same level of safety in our backups, we're just running a different type of backup for the daily process.
What does this mean for you?
1. No morning downtime.
2. No morning downtime.
3. No morning downtime.
We are still going to reserve morning period as a window where we perform server maintenance. But any downtime should be no more than a few times a month instead of daily and should only be a few minutes and will usually be pre-announced.
Enjoy!
Stephen
by GL_Support, 5 days ago
In 4.8 we are delivering a set of features centered around Guild User availability and character availability. I've already mentioned the Guild Character Availabilty, titled the "Guild Depth Chart". This summarizes the monthly availability of your guild's characters. You can read about it here:
http://support.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1215565&gid=535&f=2429
The next feature we are adding is an advanced form of the ubiquitous "What day's can you raid?" poll. Our version provides more information and more detail, but provides an awesome summary so you can see what days are good to raid at a glance.
As you can see in the screenshot above your users will let you know whether they can raid on a give day ranging from Never -> Always with options between like "1 Times a Month" or "2 Times A Month". All of this data is summarized then presented on a Week view of the information. And, the day is color coded based on the percentage of users who said they could "Always or 3 Times A Month" be available that day. And your users can update it over time as their schedules change, so when you plan raids or events for the next month you can look at current data. It's a "When can you raid?" pool on steroids.
And, along with this we will be adding the ability for you to optionally include the raid availability questionnaire as part of your guild application. The data will then be preseneted on the user's guild application. And, when they are approved for membership, their data will be added to the pool of guild data.
Enjoy!
Stephen
by GL_Support, 6 days ago
One of our database maintenance jobs hung up the database temporarily, so I had to take the site offline for a moment. Clearly, this job needs to be moved to a different time. Too much activity on the database at the time it was running. This is the fun and excitement of managing a growing, "living" application.
-Stephen