The Webmaster Zone

Hi everyone,

Very glad to announce, after many weeks of work, that the all new membership payment system is up and running!

Click on the "My Account" menu at the top of the page, then select any of the Supporting Membership options.

Key features:

1. Credit cards are accepted directly through the Stripe payment processor. No more PayPal.

(Existing Paypal membership subscriptions will continue to work until cancelled.)

2. New 3, 6, and 12 month subscription options instead of only annually.

3. One click billing/card updates and easy subscription cancellation right from the Membership page.

4. All membership payment and management functions now work on smartphones and tablets too.

If you have any questions or comments, please click "Contact Support" at the bottom of any page.

Regards,
Skye Nott

Webmaster, Autoshrine.com

Original 3264x2448 - bug fixed, all images were being resized to 500px, now correctly resized to 700px for Free and Silver members, 800px for Gold and Platinum members.

Video test:

Update - Tuesday Feb 27

The web servers was down from 10:00pm to 1:30am for maintenance which took much longer than expected. Normal operation has resumed, sorry for the delay.

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KNOWN ISSUES

The following bugs are being worked on right now, no need to report them again:

Delivery to yahoo.com and verizon email addresses is slow - looks ok now
member and events map broken fixed
attaching images to forum posts error fixed
uploading images to registry/profile error fixed
Cannot post in the forums fixed
Forum smilies not showing fixed

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Hello,

On Wednesday Feb 22 at 2:20 PM Pacific Time, the main front-end web server for this website and all the websites in the AutoShrine Network went down. Technicians were dispatched, but the server would no longer power on, probably due to a motherboard or power supply failure.

This was just one of five servers that serve this website to millions of visitors. There have been intermittent problems with this particular machine for a while - I was planning on replacing it next month. No data was lost, as I had already moved the database to a new machine several months ago.

I've been working long days since it went down to restore service as quickly as possible. Since I had to build a new front-end web server from scratch anyway, I've taken this opportunity to upgrade the underlying technology to improve security and add features. The new server is also more fault tolerant.

One major improvement is the new web server supports encryption. No more warnings about insecure passwords when you sign in, and it allows me to add new payment technology to the website. Your web browser should now indicate "Secure" or show a lock icon to indicate this website is encrypted. All old, insecure links should be automatically redirected to the new secure pages.

Since many components of the web server have changed, there may be new bugs, broken features, or performance issues. It's going to take a few weeks to get everything back to normal.

If you paid for a Supporting Membership between Wednesday Feb 20 and Thursday Feb 22, please check your Home Page and Payment History to verify they were processed properly. (both can be found under the "My Account" menu in the black navigation bar across the top of the website)

If you find anything on the website is not working the way it was before, please open a support ticket by clicking "Website problem? Send us a message" at the bottom of any page.

Thanks for your patience,

Skye Nott
Webmaster

Hello everyone,

Due to a complete failure of the database server, we went down yesterday at about 4PM Pacific Time. With a bit of ingenuity and a bit of luck, I was able to recover all data and provisioned a new server overnight.

Everything should be working normally now, with no posts or other data lost.

Ironically, it happened while I was working on a better system to back up the database.

Thank you for your patience.

Skye Nott
Webmaster

Hello everyone,

Now that the database upgrade is nearing completion, and I finally have the ability to do "hot backups" without taking the website offline for maintenance, I'd like to give everyone a little bonus.

Effective immediately, all Private Message (PM) storage limits are now doubled

Free Members: 500 -> 1,000
Silver Members: 750 -> 1,500
Gold Members: 1,000 -> 2,000
Platinum Members: 1,500 -> 3,000

Hope this makes everyone's life a little easier, especially for you vendors out there that use PMs a lot!

Thanks for your support,
Skye Nott
Webmaster

The new database servers are performing well under load, so I'll be continuing the database conversion process to the new layout for all websites, which will pave the way for better replication and backup systems.

Please expect to see the "Scheduled maintenance" message on Friday night, February 17, 2017 starting at 9:00 PM Pacific time. I expect the work to take 4-6 hours as I want to take a full backup of the system for safety before making any changes.

Once the websites are back up, there should be no visible difference in the operation or performance of the website. Schedule:

Jan 4 - HealeyExp, CycleKart, all non-forum tables (all sites)
Feb 10 - TriumphExp forums (posts, attachments, search db)
Feb 17 (planned) - MGExp forums, all other website forums

Thanks,
Skye Nott

Webmaster
AutoShrine.com