WotC Web Forums down all the time!

[naturaltwenty]

I think that it's bandwidth and rolling out changes in a live-production environment (poor change management processes) that are resulting in the outages. Not really a mystery but hopefully resolved closer to DDI go-live.

 

[Moonshade]

Have they ever explained why they need that regular daily hour of maintenance downtime? Don't they have enough money to fix it? And IIRC, it was happening before Gleemax was an issue.

I used to think Television Without Pity was a huge site with some problems, but after becoming familiar with WOTC's daily maintenance I'll not complain about getting a TWOP server error a couple of times a month.

 

[Bagpuss]

Its weird, for the last year, the forums have (unless down for maintenance)

Yes but they are and were down for maintenance two hours EVERY day, I've never seen forums that needed that level of regular maintenance.

 

[pogminky]

It seems that the WotC site has completely imploded this time.

 

[Bagpuss]

Weirdly the forums seem fine.

The wizard front page is fine, but the dnd section seems corrupt. It opens for me in firefox, but is missing all the information under the tabs, and the DnDInsider add at the side. In internet explorer it just bombs.

There are database errors if I go to the Dragon homepages in firefox, but you can at least see the page layout, and again in internet explorer it just bombs. The Dungeon homepage seem fine however.

 

[warderbrad]

One of the speculations I have heard is that the regular maintenance is due to hackers trying to get access to DDI subscription stuff. They have set up that hour to weed out false users and ban their IPs and suspend questionable accounts. The reason it is affecting the forums is that the forum IDs are linked to the DDI subscription sign in.
As for why the forums are not use able at all right now, I have no idea but wish it was fixed.

 

[doctorhook]

One of the speculations I have heard is that the regular maintenance is due to hackers trying to get access to DDI subscription stuff. They have set up that hour to weed out false users and ban their IPs and suspend questionable accounts. The reason it is affecting the forums is that the forum IDs are linked to the DDI subscription sign in.
As for why the forums are not use able at all right now, I have no idea but wish it was fixed.

Are the forums down for you right now? (I was just there, it was working for me.) Or are we just necrothreading/time-traveling to six months ago for fun?

Interesting story though, Brad. However, I'm not particularly technical; any such folk want to comment on how likely it is that this story is true?

 

[Shemeska]

Interesting story though, Brad. However, I'm not particularly technical; any such folk want to comment on how likely it is that this story is true?

I doubt that they're getting hacked. But given how little I've seen DDI site rips spread around, there doesn't seem to be a thriving interest to bother with supplying the illegal side of things. Of course, I haven't exactly gone digging around the underbelly of the web to find out, just that a keyword search in various places turns up little to no hits.

 

[chriton227]

I doubt that they're getting hacked. But given how little I've seen DDI site rips spread around, there doesn't seem to be a thriving interest to bother with supplying the illegal side of things.

If someone is trying to hack them, I really doubt they would be trying to pull the DDI content from the site. What they would be after is the subscriber information, particularly the identity and credit card information. A company with a poor track record with digital products would probably be a prime target, as they have not demonstrated the IT knowledge, expertise, or budget that would be typically be associated with a secure eCommerce project.

 

[Gorrstagg]

Has anyone else had trouble logging into the wizards forums, and what not? I can't get in and when I do successfully log in, it refuses to show me any forums. I figured someone here might of been having problems there too, just not sure what's going on.