Some of you have no doubt noticed already, but the bots have been running solidly for 19 hours now, and we have no reason to suspect that they will not continue to do so. They were online sporadically for a couple of days before that, and even sent a couple of test broadcast messages. This is thanks to the work TB's put into them over the past few days.
You should now also be able to access the main site, which we have kept disabled while we worked on it and the bots. If you have trouble, try clearing your browser's cache or using ctrl+F5 to refresh it, but that "down for maintenance" message was returning a HTTP 403 "Forbidden" error code, which browsers probably shouldn't be caching anyway.
As
I've stated elsewhere the forum has moved to its own subdomain as well, and a couple of other subdomains were created, and various files moved around the site. The end result is that we now only have two directories in the root of our site, so there will be fewer than ever conflicts with usernames (when you register, we check that your desired username won't interfere with any of our physical files or directories, as this would prevent you being able to access
www.web2messenger.com/<your_username> - though why anyone would want a username of "images" or "forum" is beyond me
). A side-effect of this is that there may be a small number of bugs in the site where a referenced file moved but the reference to it wasn't updated to reflect that move. I think and hope that I have caught all of these issues, but feel free to let us know if we missed any and we'll update them as soon as we can.
You should also notice that a new site design that I worked on the best part of a year ago is now in use.
[Edit: Sorry; I've only just realised how badly the new design breaks in Internet Explorer 7. Strangely it breaks less (but still noticeably) in IE6. I'll try to get this fixed as quickly as I can, but as is the way with working around IE rendering issues, it might take a while to fix. In the meantime, please either put up with the rendering bugs or use a browser that, y'know, doesn't totally suck I guess this makes the below point about the site being "beta" even more valid...]Also, TB wanted me to point out that due to the changes made to the bots and to the site, the whole service is even more "beta" than ever. You have been warned! It should be fine, though, but don't be too surprised if the bots crash or the website does something odd.
We still don't have status
images working, but the status texts are working fine. They're accessible via
http://www.web2messenger.com/status/<your_username>.txt, with XML and Base64/PHP-serialize encoded versions of the same data accessible by replacing that ".txt" with ".xml" or ".b64", respectively. Our
FAQs list some
third party services that existed when we wrote that question - some may even still exist now!
I've probably forgotten something, but I'll leave it there for now.
Finally, below is the list of service changes that I've been maintaining:
20/07/2007:- Moved forum to http://forum.web2messenger.com/
- Redone filesystem structure to minimise chances of usernames conflicting with our files.
- Added a new option to the Preferences page; you can now stop the bots sending you messages when your status is busy.
And some updates from
ages ago (15 months ago?!) that I forgot to ever mention:
08/04/2006:- The "remember me" feature of the login form should now work reliably.
17/03/2006:- Modified the General Chat board's description
- Status txt/xml/b64 files now also return the ClientID. This can be used to determine if you are using Web Messenger, you have a webcam, etc. More details here
- Status b64 files will now return an encoded & serialised array containing a single element - "Error" - when an error has occurred (such as the user having status images disabled)
Edit #2:
We've had some MySQL connection problems, but I've fiddled with its configuration, restarted it (which killed off three of the bots temporarily), and hopefully that will be the last of the problems.
