InsaneJournal Announcements

The site was down due to excessive database timeouts. I have corrected them and gotten the site back up. We apologize for the downtime. I am also taking time this afternoon to try to track down some of the comment loss bugs.

I know the site has had some issues lately. The main thing being that the site sometimes times out during peak times. I have identified what has happened, and to fix it, I am going to need to rebuild all of the webservers. This may take me a week or two to complete. I am going to continue doing what I can to keep things running (rebooting the servers every few days seems to keep it under control).

As far as the other issues, here is the list of known site issues. I will work on them as time permits.

* directory.bml hangs searching
* Comments still seem to be disappearing.
* Edit userpics page loading slowly for users with lots of userpics (Firefox is still slow but won't timeout and give an error as a temporary workaround)
* Adding friends via the admin console causes custom groups to get emptied
* Joining a closed membership asylum
* Timezones on update page not reflecting change in DST in United Stats
* align= and border= options in image tags being striped by the HTML cleaner
* lynx sitescheme warning
* blank preview page
* Sometimes not able to change custom colors
* stats/stats.txt not updating
* cannot log in with blackberry

Now as far as some of the criticism that has been posted here. I have simply not had the time to dedicate to the big issue of comment rot on the site. I know it is a huge problem, and I have done some tracing, and am getting close to pinpointing the problem, and once that is done, I am sure it will be something simple to fix.

Please don't feel that I have been ignoring these issues to work on other things like the sitescheme. The work on these has been done by our volunteers and takes only a few minutes of my time to implement them.

Also, do not feel that I have been ignoring all the comments, I have read them all but I just have not had the time recently to respond to comments. I will try to do better to make the time to do this.

With 52.4% of the vote. Worksafe (sidebar) is the defacto winner and is now the default scheme on InsaneJournal. This really brings IJ into the future. In addition we have removed access to most of the older schemes. We have left 'New Tweak' for those of you who liked the previous scheme, and 'Lynx' for you who prefer the lightweight schemes.

We are also working hard on a new way to display the ads so they will no longer be a hindrance to the site schemes. We hope to have this rolled out by the weekend.

Once agian, I want to send a warm round of applause to the ij_siteschemes crew and branchandroot for all of their help in getting these new schemes up and running!

Edit: We pushed out some new stylesheets. This should help some of you with the font size issues.

All 6 of the new site schemes have been updated. There have been formatting and alignment fixes, as well as font size fixes. They styles now use the default font set in your browser.

In addition we have started using alternate stylesheets which, if you are using a browser that supports alternate stylesheets, will allow you to add or remove Tweak or Tweak's Sayings.

Here is a list of the browsers that support this and how to do it. Unfortunately for Windows users Internet Explorer does not support this, and for your Mac Users, Safari and Camino do not support this either.

* Firefox users can switch stylesheets using the View > Page Style menu.
* Opera users can switch stylesheets using the View > Style menu. In Opera 7.x, you can also click the little down arrow next to the User/Author Mode (fourth) button on the Address Bar. In Opera 8, the User/Author button has moved to the view bar which pops up/down from the address bar.
* SeaMonkey, Mozilla, Netscape6+ and Epiphany (the default browser for the GNOME desktop on UNIX/Linux) users can switch stylesheets using the View > Use Style menu.
* Konqueror (the default browser for the KDE desktop on UNIX/Linux) users can switch stylesheets using the View > Use Stylesheet menu.
* Galeon (another popular GNOME browser on UNIX/Linux) users can switch stylesheets using the View > Styles menu.

Edit: The removing tweak and tweak says does not work exactly as expected. I am going to work on an easy way to set it so it stays when it is set.

The new siteschemes are officially moving out of beta, and with it we are going to change the default look of the site to one of these great new themes. Please decide which theme you think should greet new users and visitors of the site and vote today. Voting will be open for 1 week.

I want to send out my gratitude to branchandroot and the entire ij_siteschemes volunteer crew! You guys have done an AMAZING job!!!

Poll #2017 Siteschemes
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Which of these siteschemes would you prefer to be the default?

Also we have uploaded a new alternate sitescheme, it is a black and white theme (sans-tweak and tweak-says for those that don't like him). It is called Monodramatic, it, too, is available in dropdown and sidebar options.

You can select any of the available siteschemes at http://www.insanejournal.com/manage/settings/

I have finished the programming needed to bring extra userpics back for paid accounts. They are now available in the InsaneJournal Store. Your paid account will be upgraded from 250 to 400 userpics with the purchase of this item.

Edit: This is all I was able to get to today. But I will work on some more next weekend as well. I am going to commit time every weekend until all of these are fixed. Also the perm account sale has ended.

Yes, I am here fixing bugs. Keep an eye on this post as I will updated it with the status of things as they get fixed.

Bugs Fixed:
* Quickreply to comments not working
* Typo on front page
* Posting by email

New Features Added:
* Userpic browser when commenting

Bugs Not Yet Fixed:
* directory.bml hangs searching
* Comments still seem to be disappearing.
* Edit userpics page loading slowly for users with lots of userpics (Firefox is still slow but won't timeout and give an error as a temporary workaround)
* Adding friends via the admin console causes custom groups to get emptied
* Joining a closed membership asylum
* Timezones on update page not reflecting change in DST in United Stats
* align= and border= options in image tags being striped by the HTML cleaner
* lynx sitescheme warning
* blank preview page
* Sometimes not able to change custom colors
* stats/stats.txt not updating
* cannot log in with blackberry

Other issues:
* SBCGlobal/Yahoo not receiving some emails from the site

Edit: The sale has started!

Due to recent demand we are going to run a sale for this weekend only. Starting tonight at 8:00pm EDT running until Sunday at 8:00pm EDT we are putting Permanently Insane accounts and Insane Userpics back up for sale.

Permanently Insane accounts will be sold for $60 and Insane Userpics will be sold for $175.

So for slightly more than the cost of 2 years of InsaneJournal paid status, you can become Permanently Insane, and for $175 you can get access to 5000 userpic slots so you can have all the userpics you want.

Now for the site update. I know that there are a number of outstanding bugs on the site. It has been awhile since I have been able to address them. Because they are becoming stagnant, I am going to clear some time and really try to get as many of them fixed as I can this Sunday.

Here are the known site bugs that I will be working on all day Sunday. If you know of any other bugs that are not on the list, please let me know here, and before you report a bug, make sure someone else hasn't already reported it in the comments.

* Posting by email
* directory.bml hangs searching
* Comments still seem to be disappearing.
* Quickreply to comments not working
* Edit userpics page loading slowly for users with lots of userpics (Firefox is still slow but won't timeout and give an error as a temporary workaround)
* Adding friends via the admin console causes custom groups to get emptied
* Joining a closed membership asylum
* Timezones on update page not reflecting change in DST in United Stats
* align= and border= options in image tags being striped by the HTML cleaner

I just found out about the issues with userpics uploading and image verifications. I have been very busy today. I am working on this right now and will have it fixed as soon as I can.

Update: I have fixed this issue. I apologize for letting it sit there for over 24 hours. There was a problem with the back end file storage servers that was preventing it from being updated.

Due to the overwhelming load of bad ads that the other ad companies have been delivering to us, I have reverted the site back to using only google ads. While not having the diversity of multiple ad companies might hurt us in the short term, I am worried about that harm that the pop-ups, redirects, and other bad things that the other ad companies have been doing will affect us worse in the long term.

I finally got hotmail to remove the block, so those of you that use hotmail or live.com for email should now be able to get emails from the website. I apologize for how long this took.

The voting for the LiveJournal Advisory board is up. If you are so inclined, head over there and give me a vote. My username over there is squeaky19. You have the opportunity to vote for a 2nd and 3rd choice candidate, I do support rm as a second choice but I do not know any of the other candidates enough to throw my support behind them.

So head over to http://community.livejournal.com/lj_election_en/ now and cast your votes.

If you want to know my platform, I posted it here http://community.livejournal.com/vote_squeaky/1289.html

I am aware that the site was down for about 30 minutes last night. Apparently we ran out of database connections, so I upped the limit. I will keep an eye on the site tonight to see if there is anything else I can do to help with the load. Now that we are done moving, I think a lot of people starting coming back to the site and that caused the load to spike past what I thought it would.

So everyone the move to the new servers is now complete!!!

I finally canceled the last two of the old servers yesterday and we are now 100% on the new shiny fast servers. You should notice stability and speed getting a lot better. Also notifications and subscriptions should now be working.

However, we are, once again, having trouble delivering mail to a few mail providers, so please be patient with us while we work this out with them once again.

If you are missing userpics, you will need to delete and then reupload them, as we did loose some during the move and they are not recoverable.

Due to some of the feedback I have received here I believe that some of our mail may be blocked by one of the large email provider. If you are not receiving notifications or validation emails please let me know here who your email provider is.

Also, the move is now complete, so if you are still not seeing some of your userpics, you will need to remove and re-upload them. I apologize for loosing some of them.

In addition, I want to use this space to address some concerns that were brought up about scheduling downtime. I do admit that I should have done a better job at letting everyone know when I would be on working the site. The reason I did was that there was so much work to do that I was working on the site every time I had a free moment, and I didn't know when I would have free time. Moving forward I will work to give better notifications as to when there is potential downtime.