360voice Dev Blog

Major Site Maintenance Action

Update  07-14-2009 11:50PM EST:  Things are going okay, we ran into a few surprises but nothing dire.  Tomorrow all jobs will run as we need to update some of the scripts to account for findings, so leaderboards and badges will update (game pages will be a partial update).  Then on Thursday we will start maintenance up again.  We will have a better idea of where we stand Friday, but I suspect we will need to leave badges and leaderboards off through the weekend.  Thanks again for your patience.

Original Post:

We are doing some maintenance and changes on the back end processes and databases starting tonight.  This maintenance will take about 5 days, but we can't say for sure and will try to keep this updated with progress.

The following things will be affected.  They will not update at all during maintenance and might be empty or gone at times during the end of the maintenance.

• Leaderboards
• Badges
• Game Pages
• Members Games Lists/Widgets

Everything else should run as normal, that means Blogs, Challenges, Streaks will not be affected and will be business as usual. 

If you notice anything weird outside of the areas being worked on let us know.  Best to post questions or concerns in the support forum and myself (or a 3VCE giving me a helping hand) will keep on eye out.

When the maintenance is done, any past game name changes should be fixed.  Then after about a day we will push out a genre update the 3VCEs worked on.  Then after a couple more days possibly a couple new badges based on suggestions as well.  No other major changes, but streamlining things and cleaning data.  Hopefully getting a few long outstanding issues fixed up.

Thanks for all the support and patience people!

Site Updates on Track

We have been running updates on the DB and site, to get in additional data on games to work through out the site.  We haven't been able to do this in the past due to the shear size of several years worth of data that needed updated.

However with some additional servers and helping hands, we are working on updating all our tables to include the new information.  When finalized we will have additional resolution on what version of a game you are playing, so Fallout 3 PC versus Xbox, or different regions of games with the same title.  It will also fix any duplicate game name problems or game name changes like "Call of Duty: World at War".  It should help us in a lot of areas of the site as well.

Also working with some 3VCE's and finishing up some tools for rapid badge updating.  It has to happen after the updates, so it is actually a few more weeks out, but we can maybe do some stuff in the meantime to keep things moving on that front.

Hopefully once we are through the big changes, we can respond a lot quicker to site needs, so it should be a lot of fun!

No Blogs Today and Some Downtime

UPDATE 7:08PM EST - Site is back up and running, let me know if you run into anything strange.

UPDATE 6:22PM EST - Site is coming down, should be less then an hour.  Will post when we are back up. 

Because of the 24 hour outage of Xbox Live Yesterday, there will be no blogs published today. Everyone's streak will be fine as yesterday will not be counted. Blogs will resume tomorrow as normally scheduled.

Sometime today we are going to have to take the site down completely for the maintenance. I can't say when exactly and how long. We are running some scripts and changes to get things in order, and they need to run a bit longer to get a sense of how long we will need to shut down. When I know more I will update this entry.

Let us know if you have any questions on effects of the live outage, or the outage here. I am hoping to get some gaming in tonight, hopefully a little Sacred 2, Magic the Gathering or 1 vs 100.

Xbox Live Downtime - June 16th

Xbox Live is going down for some scheduled maintenance on June 16th at 12:01AM PST, for around 24 hours.  This will effect 360voice in a few ways. First on Monday June 15th, we might miss your gameplay if you are playing a game after 10:30PM PST. Second, we will record no gameplay on the 16th because of the outage, so you will not get a blog or updates for your gameplay (or lack there of) on the 16th.  You will get a free streak day on the 16th.

If the outage is more then 24 hours, we will account for that as well, so we will update as we know more.  Additional we may schedule some DB maintenance for the site.  If this is the case we will let you know about any potential downtime.

For those following the Xbox Live update, it will not bring any new features, but is preparing for all the fun stuff coming this fall, like Twitter and On Demand HD movies.  I am looking forward to this personally, so I wish the Xbox team luck!

Badges off today, updates inbound.

Badges are not going to run in full today. We are doing a bit of table maintenance in the DB, and I need to test a small change to the badge code.

We are taking this opportunity to roll out a new collection and a new genre. The collection is "The Great Outdoors" and the genre is "Top Gun". What won't be included in this update, is any updates to current genres. There are some steps into streamlining that, so expect a possible update to that in about 3 weeks.

Thanks for everyone's patience on the badge updates, discussion/feedback as always is recommended.

Update 06-10-2009 08:40AM EST: Sorry for the delay in the blogs yesterday, didn't realize table maintenance would slow them down so much.  On track to get badges back up and running today.

Top 20 Most Popular for May 2009

Here they are... some new faces on this list. The top 20 most popular 360voice blogs from May 2009:

* means comments enabled. Go say congrats!

1. dakisbac x360a *
2. the dren *
3. Stallion83 *
4. Vader XXX
5. Major Nelson
6. PSonic *
7. t4nd4r *
8. Fshguy *
9. Kornfan2007 *
10. Dog of Thunder *
11. Namey es Rey
12. aeris311
13. Mr Achievement *
14. XxSexy Ag3ntxX
15. ZOIG
16. xxx TAMMY xxx
17. Drk Fury *
18. lupadi *
19. vI Demon Iv
20. Mightymango *

Who are all you people?!?!

Power outage at our hosting company

Hi everyone,

At 8:30 CT this morning (May 30 2009) there was a power outage at our hosting facility. Our cluster was impacted, causing our job processing server to lose contact with our database servers. This means that things are delayed.

We did not lose any data... this will not affect anything like streaks and such. All it will do is delay the daily processing of blogs, rivalries, etc.

The badges will most likely not finish today, so if you are waiting for a badge, you should get it tomorrow.

Sorry for the troubles.

Trapper (ChangeAgent)

Network Fail - Blogs delayed

Somehow our job server lost network connection with our other servers early this morning.  As a result, Rivalries, Blogs, Badges and everything else did not run correctly. No data was lost, we are just working on getting everything rerun. I don't expect Blogs to start showing up until pretty late tonight, and there will be no badges for the day.

I will update when I know blogs are going in. Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE 10:05PM EST - Blogs have been running and should be done in the next couple hours. Let us know if anything looks off.

New 3VCE - Dog of Thunder

Congratulations and welcome to our newest 3VCE, Dog of Thunder. Today is his one year anniversary on the site, and we wanted to thank him for all his contributions. He has been an active and helpful forum poster and commenter, who has helped consolidate the madness around genres. He is also the 10th most watched individual on the site, has a respectable challenge score, once achieved a 58 day streak, and I heard he saved a kitten from a burning building once.

Top 20 most popular blogs - April 2009

You knew it was coming!

* means comments enabled, go say congrats!

1. the dren *
2. Stallion83 *
3. Drk Fury *
4. Mr Achievement *
5. Dog of Thunder *
6. Fshguy *
7. Buckswana *
8. Major Nelson
9. Champ Kind2007 *
10. markd12 *
11. MLC2074 *
12. PSonic *
13. SaintTheOutcast *
14. TheDuffManUK *
15. Freefloater *
16. Lawl Pwned *
17. ZeroDesolation *
18. FragEmAndSmile *
19. Vader XXX
20. MMgiggas2 *

Wow that was a seriously fast month! May! Scary!