Cantr not working? Check here first.

[EchoMan]

We have made some good progress over the weekend. We now have a proof of concept, that we have verified "offline" and our action plan seems to be good. Now we need to make some tests on the real server to make sure everything works just as fine there as it does on the offline one. Then we need to restore database backups and check that the data and access to all our administrative systems are fine.

Cantr will still be offline for a few more days while this work is being done, but at least there is a small spot of light at the end of the tunnel, and it's growing bigger. (Lets hope it's the daylight and not a speeding freight train. )

Meanwhile, there are still popping up illegal copies of the fake Cantr. We strongly recommend that you do not spend any time at all on these sites, as there is no telling what kind of malware or phishing code lies behind these copies. As stated before, only http://cantr.net, http://cantr.org, http://flizzle.net and http://joselkink.net can be trusted at the moment. Information regarding Cantr coming from other sources (or by email, since email headers are easily forged) cannot be trusted.

Generally: Don't ever trust emails asking you to login through an unknown link, or asking you to provide your user credentials. We (or any other serious provider of internet services) would never ask for user credentials in that way.

[Doug R.]

You may have noticed that the server has been taken down (the front page is gone). This is because we are making progress! The light at the end of the tunnel is getting larger.

[Doug R.]

Well, the good news is that we made security enhancements are are now testing these changes. The bad news is that the enhancements broke some things, which we now need to fix. With EchoMan being under the weather, things are progressing slower than we'd like, but they are progressing. So, the green is back, just not anywhere you can see it yet

[Doug R.]

Hello folks. I just wanted to report to you that out of the currently 9 issues that need to be fixed, 4 of them have been fixed as of this morning. One of the remaining 5 is not critical. So, we're about halfway there. As always, thanks for your patience.

[Doug R.]

5/9.

If those of you with test accounts could log in and mess around a bit, that would be great. I realize that you may have done this already, but we have improved the logging, so it will give us an opportunity to optimize some processes. When we're able to run turns, we'll need you to come back in again, but I'll make another announcement when we're ready.

[EchoMan]

Please note that staff need to apply for a new test account if you haven't already done that. Send me a PM and I'll set you up.

[Doug R.]

Barring the discovery of any more problems, four things need to be accomplished before we can go live:

1) We need to complete plugging the security holes (we thought we had done this, but testing showed we had not)
2) We need to fix our ability to run turns in the test environment.
3) We need to playtest once turns are running to make sure the fixes didn't break anything.
4) Fix the pages that run on Ajax (new build menu, some staff tools)

We've been down a month, and based on the progress we've made, it's my hope that we're closer to the end of the downtime than we are to the beginning of the downtime. Of course, I can't put a definite time-table on anything.

[EchoMan]

We are still working on fixing and rewriting the code for the game, and making some structural changes as well. It's unfortunate that it is taking so long, but there is not much we can do about it at the moment, besides keep working and hoping that real life interference can be kept to a minimum.

We still can't give a prediction when the game will be back online again, sorry about that.

[Doug R.]

Barring the discovery of any more problems, four things need to be accomplished before we can go live:

1) We need to complete plugging the security holes (we thought we had done this, but testing showed we had not)
2) We need to fix our ability to run turns in the test environment.
3) We need to playtest once turns are running to make sure the fixes didn't break anything.
4) Fix the pages that run on Ajax (new build menu, some staff tools)

We've been down a month, and based on the progress we've made, it's my hope that we're closer to the end of the downtime than we are to the beginning of the downtime. Of course, I can't put a definite time-table on anything.

1/4 there.

[EchoMan]

The game itself is now fixed, but still need a lot of testing (and maybe bugfixing). I'm now in the process of looking over the administrative tools so they work properly as well.

[Doug R.]

The relaunch is close.

[EchoMan]

When the game comes back online, please report anything not working as it used to do in the General Support Forum: viewforum.php?f=3.

Please post new details to existing topics, if there are things that differ in your experience.

[Doug R.]

The game is now open.

[EchoMan]

The game is currently not available. We're looking into it.

[Doug R.]

The snooping continues. We know the game lagged severely before it disappeared, but that may or may not be related. A reboot of the server did not bring the game back. We're exploring other possibilities.