EXCELSIOR DAILY

[+Colibri]

December donation bonus - 25% bonus ED & Stronger wooden box. For those who haven't heard on the town criers already

It started a bit late, on December 12th, but it's still going. Keeping up with the tradition, there's a 25% ED bonus, and the Stronger Wooden Box item (first donation of 40€ or more, one per account).

The bonus ends on January 2nd, there won't be any extensions. (I think a recent bonus wasn't announced on all channels, and some didn't even know about it, so it was extended for a week).

[+Colibri]

New playerservice available:

Transfer of a Instanced Housing Area bought at auction
- 1,000,000 tokens.
The Instanced Housing Area is sometimes sold at an auction, there are a few such Malas islands that are known. This transfer is made possible because the Instanced Housing Areas are scarce, they don't come up at the auction often. If the owner no longer uses it, or doesn't play anymore, it would be unfortuante for it to just be there unused. There is an idea to create a system where anyone could buy such an instance from a vendorstone, those are not planned to be transferrable. And if/when the automatic Instanced Housing Area system comes into existence, this service might be phased out.

https://www.uoex.net/codex/services/housing

[+Colibri]

Voting issues on Friday May 2nd, Topsite voting achievement.

Hey all, the website was down for about 2-3 hours on Friday, May 2nd. This made voting on topsites impossible during those times. If you were unable to vote later that day, and lost a good streak with your Topsite voting achievement, it can be restored.

Players who were at least 15 days into their achievement, can request that their achievement progress be restored. Just send a ticket, and I'll get to you in the next few days. Keep voting during this time, since I will only extend the achievement progress by how many days you've accumulated since then.

[+Colibri]

Website reconfiguration - possible unavailability in the next 24-48 hours.

You might have recently noticed an error message on the website saying "Resource limit reached", this is a result of a lot of bots lately scraping our website. It's likely AI companies training their AI models, and it is just a lot of requests, crawling mostly thru the forum but also other parts of the website. Well, the website also runs on shared hosting, meaning there isnt a whole dedicated server just to serve this website, but there's no need for a beefier server just to be able to serve all the requests from bots.

I'm kind of old-school, and wanted our website to just run as a plain web-server, but the internet these days is just different from how it was in 2005. So I've finally given up and I'm moving us to CloudFlare, a name that you probably seen before when browsing the net, it's a kind of website shield - it caches the website, so when someone wants to access it, it just gives them the cached content. Or if necesary, it might require a visitor to solve a Captcha before they can do some more intense browsing on the website (and consume more resources), or before they interact with the website like logging into the forum.

Since it takes several hours to a whole day for the new website configuration to propagate globally, it can happen that some things on the website won't work for a few hours or a day, before I get to fix it. I made sure to properly transfer configuration for our subdomains such as shard.uoex.net, portal.uoex.net, vendors.uoex.net,... But maybe I missed something or made a mistake.

[+Colibri]

Forum upgraded, resetpassword form fixed.

Yesterday on June 12th I've upgraded the forums from PhpBB 3.2 to 3.3, as it became known already viewtopic.php?p=86909#p86909
I also fixed the email sending configuration, so those who will be creating a new account, will get the verification email into their inbox.
I made a mistake during the process so it took a bit longer, and it seems that there was a global internet outage just around the time when I was doing the upgrade, so those 15-30 minutes turned into a few hours.
Most of the site (frontpage, codex, ...) was also unavailable at the time, so that means some of you might not have been able to vote on topsites. I've set an exception to the topsite-voting-achievement, if you missed it during that day but have then voted the next day, you'll keep the achievement progress.


Also just now, I fixed the broken reset-password form at this address:
https://www.uoex.net/resetpassword
Although when returning players send me an email, it's an opportunity to say hello, it's probably better if most people can reset their passwords without any extra wait.


Btw, I know that the Wiki is somewhat broken - it shows the text, just in a very early 90's internet fashion, no styling. It's on the todo list too.