Admin

We have just installed a massive update of our payment module. As I have posted about before, we have been having a lot of problems with this. The updates are not any "visual" updates, but mostly bug-fixes and other stuff. The reason I am posting about this is that the update will most likely affect a lot of members who have been a VIP/Platinum and who now notice that they are not. The reason for this is that this update also required a big database update. Because of this, the update automatically has downgraded all members who did not have a valid product and/or payment schedule in their profile. This basically means that all memberships has been corrected to their "correct" status. When I say correct, I mean that all members who have not renewed their memberships, but were not downgraded because of an error in our payment system is now a regular member again, as they should be. Unfortunately, this will also affect some members who should not be downgraded. Because of previous errors in our payment system, there are members who doesn't have an active payment on profile, even though they have paid their fees. An automate system does of course not take this into consideration, so there might be valid VIP/Platinum members who have been downgraded. There are also members who have been upgraded as a prize or by the admin team for various reason. These members will most likely also show up as regular members. If you notice that you no longer are a VIP/Platinum member, please do the following; 1. Check the status of your membership and if your membership has expired. Use the "Client area" to do this. This is accessible through the drop-down menu in the top right corner (Client Area -> Purchases) or you can click here: http://www.rwgforum.com/index.php?app=nexus&module=clients&section=purchases 2. If you see only expired items, this means that all your purchases have expired and you need to upgrade again. You can do this in our store: http://www.rwgforum.com/store If you see only expired products, but you are sure that you have paid, send me a PM with your Paypal-address and I will look into it as soon as possible. 3. If you don't see any products, but you know you have purchased an upgrade, please send me a PM with your PayPal-address and I will look into it as soon as possible. 4. If you don't see any products, but you have been upgraded by the admin team as part of a prize or other reason, please contact the team member who originally upgraded you or PM me with info about how, why and when you were upgraded. I am terrible sorry for the inconvenience this will cause some of our members, but unfortunately this had to be done to get our system working as it is supposed to.

Looking through some of my favorite videos on YouTube and then the video below showed up. Not the best music, so I am having a hard time figuring out why I put it among my favorites

Due to continuous abuse of the auction + fundraiser sales forum (Members never donating after selling items, members posting items on several forums, etc.) we have decided to close the auction sales area. It will no longer be possible to post new threads in the forum and all ongoing auctions are to be treated as closed by the admin. This means that all bids placed are no longer valid. We are sorry for the inconvenience and will hopefully be able to find a better solution for sales like this in the future.

Try again now. You will probably get some error messages on top of the page, but you should be able to select payment method and then go through the checkout process.

Should be good now. Let me know if it's the same

Hmm...I just installed an update to the "store" software, so I'll have to look into this.

Well, that can always be fixed

Hi guys Sorry for the unexpected downtime. I am working on some changes for the forum and yesterday I was installing a new caching software on our webserver. Apparently this didn't go as planned, so the forum has been offline for some time. This has now been fixed. My apologies for any inconvenience caused to our members.

Our...ehm..."tech crew" is on their way for a little "bat"....oh, sorry..."chat"....I meant "chat"!!

As you probably know, DNS propagation can take anything from 10 second up to 72 hours (and more), so as soon as the correct DNS data is loaded for you, the problem will be solved

The address I have changed to is out@rwgofurm.com and not ou@rwg.com, as you say in your post. Don't know where you get this from, as we don't own and/or control rwg.com. Most likely reason you are getting the error above is that I deleted the DNS for our hostname, so it was missing for a short while. For those of you interested; the reason we have changed our e-mail setup and the reason some of your mail might end up in your spam-filters is that our domain/IP has for some reason been added to a lot of spam-blacklists(RBLS) that many providers validate e-mails against and this is not something we want.

Been listening to the new album from Norwegian band Eva & The Heartmaker all day...loving it... Album on spotify: Album on Wimp: http://wimp.no/album/5595761

A big, big thank you to all of you who have made a donation. You are making things a lot easier for us (well, me, since I am the one paying the bills) Your support is highly appreciated!!

We've been having some problems with the topics views ever since the forum went offline. This has now been fixed, so the topic views are once again updated every 3 hours.

Always great to see some familiar faces

Hi guys Sorry for the downtime, but I had to take the servers down for some emergency maintenance and didn't have time for any notifications.

Well, the datacenter has been very helpful through this entire event and have made several machines available for me, both windows and linux to attempt to get data back from the disks. They are still investigating what went wrong and the fire has closed down almost 400 servers that was in the same room, as our rack. Everything has been moved to a new room, including our new servers. The only rack that was affected was ours and the routines and equipment did indeed work, but I know by experience that there are several different fire prevention systems out there and I'm not sure if our current datacenter is using one of those that can detect components from smoldering components, as this will be the first sign of something wrong, before smoke and/or flames appear and all "regular" systems detect these things. I will wait for their final report before deciding what to do, but I don't think they could have done anything different and I don't think we are entitled to a big claim anyway. We'll see..

No. All content that can be restored has been restored.

OK. I have some stuff that is running in the background that I need to wait for, so here are some more details; When the site went offline Friday, I was going to contact the datacenter where our servers are located, but they beat me to it and contacted me (which is not good, because either I owe them money or there is something VERY wrong somewhere) Well, I knew I did not owe them any money, so this had to be bad news and it was; There had been a fire in the rack where our servers were located. The fire was quickly put out, but not quick enough. Before I continue, here is a little background info for you guys. We run separate web and database servers to speed things up a bit. My regular setup is at least 3 hard drives per server; 2 drives in a RAID1 setup (this will create identical content on 2 disks, so that if one fails, it can easily be replaced and all content is still available on disk 2 and when a new disk is inserted, all content is synced to both disks again) The 3rd disk is used for our nightly backups. All content is then archived (this is why the servers are so unresponsive sometimes. It takes a bit of computing power to put all our content into an archive) and stored on the 3rd disk. On top of this, I also rsync the archived backups on disk 3 to a separate, off site location. OK, so we had a fire in the datacenter and lost all of our servers. "No biggie. I've got backups" Well, unfortunately all of our disks were somehow damaged, and it was simply not possible to get any content from any of the disks. Again..."No biggie. I've got backups". And this is where the "fun" starts. (I seriously thought everything was lost forever when the next thing happened). When I started to restore the latest backups, NONE of them worked. Not sure why, but all backups failed file checks and the archives were corrupt. So basically that means I had no backups left. Bad luck like this should not be possible.....A backup setup like this is usually bulletproof...Our techs at the datacenter had never heard of anything like this! But then Lady Fortuna smiled to me; On Wednesday I downloaded one of the main backups from our server to get a couple of files from it and it was still on my home computer. YAY! So to be on the safe side, I made several copies of this file and started to upload it. Now, this file was about 52GB in size (Every daily backup file is this big!) and I can only tell you that it takes a loooong time to upload such a file on a 5MB outbound connection. After starting the restoration this morning, my time, and running into a few minor problems with the database, everything was once again working again. All content posted since Tuesday is gone and this also goes for PM's and any other "stuff" that you have managed to put on our server. So if you sent me a PM and I did not fix it, PM me again. If you posted something funny, interesting, etc, post it again Oh, and if you upgraded your membership these days, PM me or e-mail me at admin@rwg.cc to get the upgrade applied to your account again. Remember to include your PP-address or transaction number in your PM/email.

Finally back online, but unfortunately on a week old backup (Well, since the board went down on friday and the backup is from tuesday, it's more like 3 days old) I've still got a bunch of errors to figure out, but never in my entire computer life have I ever had this run of bad. I'll get back to you with more details when I find the time, but just to give you a hint; The server died on Friday because of a fire in the server

Have just added a small, but useful feature for our members, who sometimes seems to be experts in going off topic in topics. So what could be more useful than a off-topic tag Here is what I have written on the topic O.T. This is totally off topic, but I just had to show off this new off-topic text The post uses the off-topic tags, as you can see below. Here is what I have written on the topic [ot]This is totally off topic, but I just had to show off this new off-topic text[/ot] [/code]

Well, as some of you might be aware of, we have been having some big problems with the payment system over the last couple of weeks. Basically an upgrade from the creators of the forum software screwed things up majorly and both me and them have not been able to fix this. Because of this, I will have to go through all recurring memberships (these are the ones causing problems) and I will cancel the recurrence, refund the last payment and then reset all purchases. So if you have been a VIP or platinum member and your account is downgraded all of a sudden, this will most likely be the reason. You will also see a couple of e-mails from PayPal regarding a refund and a cancelled subscription. I am truly sorry about this, and I hope the members who we have to downgrade because of this will use our store and upgrade their memberships immediately again; http://www.rwgforum.com/store/ I will, as far as possible, notify all members who we downgrade by PM also. Please contact me by e-mail on admin@rwg.cc if you have any questions or if you think you have been downgraded by a mistake. Your support is highly appreciated and what keeps this forum going.

We are having massive problems with the new payment system that is included in the forum software. My best advice is for you to PM me your PayPal-address and I will cancel any recurring payments so that you can re-upgrade. This pretty much goes for all members who are experiencing problems.

Too funny!