World of Naruto Forums

Here are some FAQs about what happened recently:

Q: Why did we lose so much on our accounts?
A: We had various major crashes and had to go back to backups.

Q: Are things secure now?
A: Yes. Whilst we still have a few long-standing bugs to deal with, the issues that caused these problems are now solved.

Q: What caused the big crash?
A: Invisible control characters as a result of a translation from Linux to Windows while moving our site from giggle.mudmagic.com to jitterbug.mudmagic.com, which our hosts (MudMagic) did to try to increase our speed and space and generally make the MUD better.

Q: When did the move happen?
A: In mid June 2009.

Q: When did the crash happen?
A: In early August 2009.

Q: Why did it take almost 2 months for the crash to happen?
A: Primarily because I didn't update the code, the invisible control characters did a lot less damage than if I was actively updating the code.

Q: Why didn't you notice the invisible control characters earlier?
A: Because I wasn't updating the code, I didn't realise that they were causing damage.

Q: What are invisible control characters?
A: Linux has some characters that they display but that Windows ignores. For example, ^C is used in Linux when someone hits CTRL+C, while in Windows that is completely blank. Windows similarly has some things that are invisible in Linux. Most of these things are used by hitting the CTRL key and as such they are called control characters.

Q: Why are they invisible?
A: They are invisible because each system ignores different characters.

Q: How do you get rid of them?
A: You can't get rid of them when using the wrong system because they are invisible. You have to use a different operating system to get rid of them.

Q: What were the invisible control characters that we had?
A: Ours were something that looked vaguely like an "a". It was related to a call of our function "logf" which instead displayed as something like "alogfa", but with foreign characters instead of the a, which I can't display on this web forum.

Q: Why did this create problems?
A: It created problems only when we crashed. "logf" is a function that is used to write to the log file any problems that occur. Because there were a few things, including kuroari puppet bugs, that were causing crashes, each time that it crashed, it created more problems, because it was calling "alogfa" instead of "logf".

Q: What kind of problems did it cause?
A: At some point, it began deleting area files. As at the last backup that MudMagic made, it had deleted half of the Holding Area, as well as portions of New Konoha and Old Konoha.

Q: What did this do to the MUD?
A: Holding Area is an area that is primarily used for special things that imms do, which includes some special items. As players who were logged on at the time had some of these items, the MUD panicked and crashed permanently, wiping all of their player files. It did a lot more damage than this too.

Q: How did this get fixed?
A: Eventually, we were able to convince MudMagic to use their linux machines to delete the funny "a" looking characters surrounding logf.

Q: How long did it take to fix it?
A: It took about a week to convince MudMagic to do it, but it took them about 5 seconds to fix the problem, using their Linux machine.

Q: Why did we go back to April code and April player files?
A: This was because of a mess up by me (Ichike) when I was trying to fix this and I accidentally wiped the wrong files and wiped the live files instead of the backup files. April was our last backup.

Q: What about all of the crashes and problems with the April code?
A: There were various bugs in the April backup, which I couldn't fix for a week or so because of the invisible control characters. All of these were fixed up when we returned to more up to date code.

Q: What about all of this talk about shutting down?
A: If we had been unable to get rid of the invisible control characters, I quite realistically would have had little choice but to shut it down. It simply wouldn't work otherwise.

Q: How did you get old backups?
A: MudMagic gave us backups of our site from: 1) mid june 2) 2nd August 3) 20th August, which they luckily had a copy of.

Q: Is everything okay now?
A: Basically, yes. A few accounts were wiped still and there are a few bugs, but we are basically all hunky dory.