Dan's site

email trouble

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 11:43:38 +0000

Our email system is currently having trouble with all hotmail.com addresses. If that is holding you up, please hang on until we get the system admins to fix this.

Hub icon size restriction.

Mon, 19 Aug 2002 20:11:26 +0000

Hub icons (the 64x64 things that spice up the game listings) were sucking up too much bandwidth. Some of the large GIFs have been truncated to a single frame, which might not look good in some cases. Icon files are now restricted to 10k or less, just to keep things from getting bogged down.

Hub Insanity

Thu, 16 May 2002 18:01:42 +0000

Some of you may have gotten an hourly daily report from the hub server. Oops!

Due to some yet-to-be-optimized parts of the daily processing code, this was also causing some big delays responding to queries, so things were basically down for much of last night. Should all be going fine now.

--Dan

Secure Site Access Problems [Edit]

Mon, 25 Mar 2002 04:43:22 +0000

The following is a note from our ISP. Contrary to their assurances, I personally am no longer able to access the secure site from my IE and a few other people have also had problems. I'm researching this further to find a work-around (other than upgrading IE).

We've changed our SSL setup a bit.

In response to Microsoft's broken implementation of SSLv3 in some versions of Internet Explorer, we had turned SSLv3 off entirely.

However, there are a few people out there on the internet who have (for one reason or another) changed their browser settings to ONLY use SSLv3. Because SSL connections happen before browser information is sent, there was no way to only disable SSLv3 for these specific IE versions.

To fix problems with these users, we've made the SSL configuration only turn off the specific SSLv3 ciphers that Microsoft fudged. We've also turned on the SSLSessionCache (because these versions of IE assume that you use caching).

[Edit] Dissabling SSL3 support in IE appears to have fixed my access problems.

Linux Version

Fri, 22 Feb 2002 23:33:09 +0000

Ahem. Oops. I was messing around and accidentally goofed up this thread, so I'm re-opening it now.

The linux version reportedly is not handling screen objects correctly, which is odd, because the backend code is identical between windows and linux. Were there any error reports in the log file?

--Dan

busted forum

Mon, 18 Feb 2002 04:23:15 +0000

Oops. I busted the forum for a few hours today. Should be working again now. Sorry folks!

I've been working like mad to reorganize some database stuff here, because improving the design of a couple things is going to make a lot of difference.

--Dan

BYOND Passport

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 22:43:00 +0000

I just fixed the most likely cause of the passport troubles that a number of people have been having. Please try again and verify that all is well. You'll need to be online so Dream Seeker can grab a new copy of your key.

--Dan

BYOND Hub Changes

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 01:33:41 +0000

We have switched on the new channel system. There are still a few new features in the works (such as forums integrated into the hub).

If your game did not happen to get seeded into the new system, simply go to your hub control panel, click on the item, and then go to "distribution". From there, you can choose a channel to submit to. The channel admins will then give it a fair review and get back to you with any questions or requests.

In general, a game should not be submitted until it has all of the basic ellements of a playable game. Until you are ready for that, any game session can be aired in BYOND.Live's live game section, so it is not like your game is being censored. People can also find it by searching the hub and, of course, you are free to publish your game's hub page from anywhere on the net or in other channels that may spring up.

--Dan

Private Library Channels

Tue, 27 Nov 2001 18:50:24 +0000

Some of you who work in a group who shares code through "invitation only" libraries might appreciate the ability in the new channel system to publish stuff for channel members only. That way, you can just configure the list of users in one place, rather than for each individual library. You can still publish a library in multiple channels and you can add individual subscribers to the library who are not channel members, so it is completely flexible.

Not only that, but members who go to your channel can see a nice index of all the stuff published there, in case they ever need to do so. If you have a website for your development group, you can just link to the channel from there and it makes a nice addition.

Well, let us know if this is useful and if anything can be improved.

--Dan

Announcing hub channel changes

Mon, 26 Nov 2001 04:09:59 +0000

Beginning tomorrow, we will be reorganizing a number of things in the hub game listings.

Under the new system, games do not generally get published on the "front page" of the hub. The author has to select a publication channel and then the channel admins have a chance to review the item and possibly work with the author to develop a finished product that is consistent with the requirements for the channel in question.

For a short time, we will be creating and overseeing a set of "official" publication channels, but we would like to see alternate channels spring up soon after that so that fan groups and what-not can administer their own channels.

I am just announcing this now, because I don't want anyone to get overly concerned when suddenly their game doesn't appear where they were expecting it to be. The new publication standards will be a little stricter, but, on the other hand, there will be more specific outlets for authors to use (like, say, a channel for spoofs of other games) so we will no longer be stuck with trying to fit everyone into one nitch.

It will also be possible for people to create "clubs" with a channel membership fee, so you can broadcast live games within the channel for the eyes of other members only.

Anyway, give us a few days to sort things out and then we'll put this all online.

--Dan