World of Naruto Forums

I can't really accuse others of panicking, as I did it first! I am sure that a lot of people quit over the recent happenings. I nearly did myself, and I am running the whole thing!

The bottom line is that, with any luck, things should be basically back to normal within 1 week.

The problem seems to have happened when the hosts at MudMagic were moving our servers (from giggle to jitterbug), which was meant to make us faster and more reliable, back in June 09. This caused a myriad of problems at the time, including us being shut down for a few days. It looks as if, unknown at the time, there was an additional problem - they had inadvertently also put in an invisible control character.

As anyone who has done Linux coding externally via Windows before would know, invisible control characters can happen very easily by accident with any translation from Windows to Linux. The problem is that Linux can see them but Windows ignores them. If you have a Linux machine, you can very easily just go in there and find it and delete it, in a matter of seconds. Through Windows, you cannot do a single thing, as you can't see it. Even though you are doing it externally and logging in to Linux, the Windows just ignores it - making it invisible. They are just plain awful things. Many viruses are created using invisible control characters. Just do a Google search.

I can't be 100% certain that the hosts added this. It is possible that I did it myself a week or so ago when trying to fix up the code. It is far more likely that the hosts added it, but it is theoretically possible that I did.

The hosts told me that they can see it, yet, annoyingly, are yet to get rid of it. I asked them to get rid of it, and, with any luck, they will do so in the next few days, hopefully tomorrow. Communication is tough as we are on different time zones, so this has to wait a little while.

On top of this, I asked the hosts if they had backups of the code between April 09 and now, and, thankfully, they have! They sent me a copy of the code from mid June 09, which I have saved to my computer, and also have a copy of the code from mid July and one from just a week ago, but have yet to send me the 2 more recent versions of the code. I will have to analyse these to see if they are any use, but at least the area files should be - while the code should be the same as I hadn't modified it in that time. I will probably use the player files for everyone except for the 10 or so who got wiped.

So, put simply, in a few days we should be back to normal, or as normal as we can be.

I fully understand people who left over this. I nearly left myself.

Presuming that we do get things back to normal, I will promise to make it up to the people that stayed about in spite of all of this, especially those with established characters. I am not exactly sure how, but it will probably be in the form of item rewards, for some special items to reward players who stuck by it. "World of Naruto loyalty patch" for eyes perhaps? I don't know. We will do something though.

Of course, if things don't get back to normal, well, we are stuffed, but it looks now as if the hosts will help us out here.

I do occasionally say some bad things about MudMagic, because, quite frankly, they do stuff up a fair bit. Just the same, we all do, and the good thing is that they are still there providing good service at the end of the day. They don't have to give me backup copies of the file, yet they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They also don't have to get rid of this invisible control character and could just tell me to install Linux on my machine and get rid of it myself. Hopefully, though, they will do that. They haven't actually agreed to yet, but hopefully they will.

By the way, people should probably use this forum more, as it is a good way to discuss things without relying on Mud Magic etc. By using this, if the MUD goes down, you can talk about it and get updates.

Ichike