My web host had a server go belly-up Thursday August 21st and had to do some major work to get things back up and running. Fortunately they were able to get things fixed in time for the game, but they were still working on the configuration and everything was VERY slow, so some people had trouble logging in. Everything was working and we did have a game, we've never lost a night because of hardware issues and hopefully never will. However, these things crop up from time to time, every host has outages once in a while and there's no way to prevent it. That got me thinking about how to minimize the chances of it cancelling a game and found a simple workaround. This site, http://www.total-trivia.com is kind of schizophrenic. It's a site unto itself that holds normal web pages, images, the sites scoring database, etc, while the chat software is located on the parachat server and to get into the room we have to use this site as a portal to connect to our specific chatroom on their server. It has to be that way and I won't bore you with the details why. So that makes playing a game dependent on two different servers working at the same time. So far that has not been a problem, but as some of us learned last night, just because something never went wrong before doesn't mean it won't break in the future. If the server that hosts the parachat software is down there's nothing that we can do. However, if Total-Trivia.com was down while the parachat server was up we'd have a perfectly good chatroom to use and no way to reach it and that's almost sort of what happened last night. It seemed like a good idea to take steps to remove that variable from the equation. I've set up a dummy site as a portal into the chatroom so that if Total-Trivia.com is down you can use the secondary site as a way to get into the functioning room. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of medical grade marijuana or something to that effect. So everyone, right now, visit http://total-trivia.comule.com/ and bookmark that page. While you're there make sure you can connect to the room through it. You shouldn't have any trouble except that perhaps you'll have to grant it an exception to run the java applet. You shouldn't have any trouble, I tested it and it's working fine. Continue to use this site on a daily basis and connect to the room from here. If however it's game time and you can't connect to this site, go to the bookmarked backup site at http://total-trivia.comule.com/ and get into the chatroom from there. You might never need it, but it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

That is all, you may resume your lives.

Oh yeah, one more thing. It would be helpful if the braintrust here had a mailing list of email addresses so that, in the event of the solid waste product having an unscheduled interface with the rotary blades we could spread the word more easily. That would prevent people from sitting there clicking on broken links or seeing error messages without being sure if the problem is on the site, the parachat server or on your own machine/connection. So if you want to be kept in the loop for surprise outages/glitches and informed about potential workarounds, please make sure that Bob, Hez and I have your email addresses.