360voice Dev Blog

Squids Sync Tool Fixed

There was a bug with the sync tool that was causing certain games not to synch for folks after we updated our system.  It has been fixed, and you can grab it from this thread.

So if you ran that, and were still missing games, go ahead and download the new version and give it once more shot.  I also really want to thanks the 3VCEs, they have been taking their time to help us and users out a great deal.  They have been resetting users on request, giving a ton of feedback, testing, and doing a ton to the support the site.  Also they are helping get thing in order for the badge update, once we iron out the remaining kinks.

We are still working on  some pages that are linking or showing games via the old method, cataloging these, and Squid will be working through and cleaning these up.  Today will be the first day we run 100% of the jobs, through to the last badge.  I will also be going through this thread in the afternoon and double checking folks still having issues.  So if you reran the sync tool and still see problems, throw a message in there, with a bit of the detail. 

Update 8/1/2009 - Noonish:  I still haven't got a chance to go through the support thread completely, but the 3VCE's have been going to town helping you guys!  I will go through some more tonight for people that are having problems after the both syncs have been run.   

More Major Site Maintenance Action

Update  07-24-2009 Early (IF YOU ARE STILL MISSING GAMES): We've discovered a bug in the synch tool, that's not synching games for some folks.  If you are still missing games this is most likely the cause.  We will work on getting an updated version out soon.  Stay tuned here for details.  If you can not run the synch tool, or have other issues with your games list, please check back in 24 hours for more details. Thanks for everyone's continued patience.

Update 3:15PM EST 07-24-2009:  We are going to be in pretty heavy maintenance mode all weekend it looks like.  We should make it through leaderboards today, and hopefully to badges tomorrow late if all goes well.  For folks that we have processed fully things should start looking pretty normal by Saturday night. 

Everyone is missing games from the last 7 days, those will fill in today. However if you are missing more and your game list is not finished, please continue reading.  We are currently processing by streak order, but if you want to be bumped up, just read this forum thread.  Again thanks for your patience folks, will have an update on progress this evening.

We have been retooling the entire site, to work off new game ids and changing most back end process, and things are going well.  Squidpunch recently went-to-town on the front end, getting things plugged as well as updating the sync tools.  We still have some more to do but making major strides.

Right now the biggest hold up, is just processing everyone's updated game list.  Depending on the size of the list, time can vary greatly, so it's taking longer then anticipated (you all play a lot of games!).  So Badges, leaderboards and game list updates will be down through Thursday.  On Friday you will start seeing things click on again.

It will take about 24-48 hours for everything to fully start back up and return to normal.  So peoples game lists may disappear on Thursday or Friday until things catch up.  Also badges will start populating on Friday as well, and for some people they may also disappear for part of the day.  Finally leaderboards, gameplay charts, and lists will then start populating and might have a downtime as well on Friday.

So thanks for dealing with the extended reduction in features, all the work is already improving things for us on the backend, and really glad we finally got this done!

Major Site Maintenance Action

Update  07-19-2009 5:31PM EST: First off sorry for the slow blogs the last two days.  Yesterday a script cleaning data slowed it down more then expected.  Today replication broke, due to an error, and wasn't caught right away.  So blogs should appear later tonight for everyone. Second, you may notice your game list changing.  Games may disappear, or scores might be wrong.  We are working on migrating everyone's list to the new structure and that is a side effect.  Things are going well, but the migrations are slow, so I will post a schedule of what things look like this week in the next day or so.  Getting closer!

Update  07-16-2009 2:47PM EST:  We just squashed another problem with older data, and getting closer to the next step.  Tonight we have to do some data updates, which is going to crunch for a while and slow the server down.  So things might be a little slow when it hits the front end, but it should be late when traffic is lighter.  No ETA yet when things will be back to normal, but leaderboard and badges will be down through the weekend for sure.

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.