InsaneJournal Announcements

It's that time of year again, Tax Time.

We have decided that we will be running a permanently Insane account sale for the remainder of tax time. You have from now until midnight on April 17th to take advantage of this opportunity.

We are putting Permanently Insane accounts up for sale for the discounted price of $40 (20% off our regular price).

Thank you, as always, for supporting InsaneJournal!

We have updated the conversation on ads.

http://squeaky.insanejournal.com/82506.html

We have updated our ads conversation HERE

We are having an open discussion on ads on InsaneJournal, and I have updated the latest post. Join the conversation By Clicking This Link

Due to forces outside of our control, we have had to change our ad provider. Our previous ad provider decided that we no longer were a fit for them. I was very very happy with this provider, but now have been forced to move onto our second choice.

While this may cause some pain to our end users, ads are an unfortunate necessity to keep the site up and running. If you run into any problems with the ads on the site (i.e. spyware, crashing, or pornographic ads), please let me know so we can resolve this ASAP.

Thank you for your understanding.

The InsaneJournal holiday sale is nearing it's end. Regular prices will be back in affect on Sunday January 1st, 2012.

It's that time of year again boys and girls. InsaneJournal is going to be putting all of our account types on sale for the entire holiday season. Our sale prices will be discounts of 20% on select items!

Permanently Insane Accounts - $40
12 Month Self-Committed - $20
12 Month Extra Userpics - $16
Rename Tokens - $4

We will also be selling our unique Insane Userpics option for $150. This rarely offered item allows you to upgrade your Permanently Insane account to 5,000 Userpics with no expiration.

This all kicks off Friday, November 25th at 12:00AM (GMT)

WAIT, THERE IS MORE!

For the first 24 hours oftne holiday sale, we are going to discount all of our prices even further. These extremely low prices are going to be so low that we aren't even going to advertise them. The only way to see these prices is to visit http://www.insanejournal.com/pay and see them for yourself once the sale has started.

Set your alarms now here are some local times that the sale will be starting.

Sydney, Australia - 11/25/2011 - 1:00PM
Tokyo, Japan - 11/25/2011 - 11:00AM
Moscow, Russia - 11/25/2011 - 4:00AM
Madrid, Spain - 11/25/2011 - 1:00AM
London, UK - 11/25/2011 - 12:00AM
Eastern Time, US - 11/24/2011 - 7:00PM
Pacific Time, US - 11/24/2011 - 4:00PM

So we did it, today marks 10 years since InsaneJournal first came online! I wanted to do this anniversary with much more fanfare surrounding it, but time was just not on our side.

Please use this post to talk about your favorite InsaneJournal memories over the last 10 years.


To celebrate, and thank you for keeping us around for 10 years, we are lowering the cost of Self-Committed[paid] accounts just for today.

The prices are now set as

1 Month - $2
6 Month - $5
12 Month - $10

These prices will only be in affect until about 10am (EDT) Monday. So get them while you can!!!

Thank you again for all of your support. Keep an eye out for the Black Friday sale coming up on November 25th

And for something I think is kinda cool, the first post ever to InsaneJournal
http://system.insanejournal.com/309.html

Due to the issues this week, we have decided that it is necessary to continue the Permanently Insane account sale through the long weekend.

This will allow us to build a bit of a financial buffer incase further issues cause us to need to abandon our current hosting company.

Permanently Insane accounts are still available from http://www.insanejournal.com/pay for $50. This is the same cost of 2 years of Self-Committed access with even greater benefits. You will be helping the site and you will get some of the best benefits this site has to offer. Its a win-win.

Here is the info on what happened yesterday that caused us to be down all day.

We contacted our service provider to upgrade the hardware in both of our database servers. One server was getting more RAM and the other was getting additional hard drives added. The server getting RAM was back up and running in very little time at all.

The other server, however was not so lucky. The additional hard drives caused some issues with the server and it took the provider over 6 hours to diagnose and resolve the issue. While the server is up and running, there is a lingering issue that can only be resolved by replacing that server.

Our hosting provider is going to be providing us with a server as soon as they can provision one and we will begin migration to it as soon as it is available.

What this means to you is that the site will have to go down for the time it takes to move the database to the new server. This is a very large database so this will take a considerable amount of time (2-4 hours estimated). In order to prevent the server from loosing any entries or comments, we will have to have the site shut off for that period of time.

Once this is done, we will be decommissioning the old broken server and the site will return to stability.

The times of this downtime will be posted to the IJ Twitter feed (@insanejournal) or on our facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/InsaneJournal/199532194739). Please follow these feeds as they are the only place to get information if the site is offline.

We are back online and better than before. There were some major pains with today's upgrades. But the site should run much better now. I will post a more detailed description later.

Hello InsaneJournalers!!

InsaneJournal is running a Permanently Insane account sale for the next few days to raise funds for hardware upgrades. We need to increase disk space and add memory to our database servers. This sale will run for at least the next 72 hours. We will announce then if the sale will be extended.

The cost of Permanently Insane accounts is $50. Visit http://www.insanejournal.com/pay/ to upgrade.

Please note that this account status is non-transferable. In addition, if your account is currently Self-Committed[paid], you can open a support request to have any remaining paid time transfered to another account.

Anyone who is trying to access the site from a TMobile phone should now be able to access the site. Looks like their block of addresses got caught back when we were trying to fend off the DDoS attack a few months ago.

I just want everyone to know that we do continue to constantly monitor and evaluate the performance of InsaneJournal. There have been some complaints here and there, but the site is functioning as expected. I know there are those who say it doesn't ever work for them but I have posted a graph showing average response times for the site in the month of July and this graph shows that some brief periods of unresponsiveness (usually coinciding with weekly backups) exist the overall responsiveness of the site is consistently under 2.5 seconds. In addition we are always monitoring notifications and while they do tend to get backed up a couple times a day they are all sent out without errors. If you are not receiving them make sure that your email provider is not incorrectly classifying InsaneJournal's email as SPAM.

Due to overwhelming feedback we have changed the way we are going to display the Google +1 feature on user's journal. Instead of displaying it by default and allowing user's to opt-out of having it shown, we are going to not display it by default and allow users to opt-in.

If you don't know what +1 is all about, here is what I posted yesterday

This is a new effort by google to allow you to help your friends out by recommending google to improve the search results of pages that you like. You can read more about it by clicking the link below.

To opt into having this on your site themed journal entry pages and on your profile, just visit http://www.insanejournal.com/manage/settings/ and check the box at the bottom of the page. You will have to do this separately for asylums if you want this to show there. Please be aware that if an asylum turns this on, it will still show on asylum posts even if you have it disabled for your account.

Thanks for the feedback, and please keep enjoying InsaneJournal.