SquidgeWorld Archive

Yes, if you tried to get onto the archive since Sunday morning, you'll notice we weren't up and running. The reasons were many.

First, the failing SSD. When we rebooted after a kernel upgrade on Sunday, the SSD failed to boot. It would just not recognize itself as a bootable device. So after doing lots of things, I performed a "cloning" process to clone the data from the old, failing SSD to a new one. And that went perfect - until it didn't. See, instead of cloning just that SSD, it actually overwrote the second SSD for some reason, and altered what's called the UUIDs of both devices. The UUID is a unique identifier for a device - and it became corrupted on the second drive, so much that even if I could boot up the first replacement, I couldn't do anything with the system because it barfed at duplicate UUIDs.

That led to reinstalling. But beyond that, because of a few factors, I updated the level of code that is current for OTW's AO3. And then there were issue because the old code relied on certain specific items like elasticsearch 6.8, certain Java code levels, and certain Ruby gem levels that weren't available anymore and/or were outdated. So my update failed until I pulled all new code.

We should have been up by Tuesday morning at the latest. However, I shot myself in the foot (figuratively) because I overwrote some configuration items that I shouldn't have. This resulted in very mixed results - sometimes the configuration would work, sometimes not. And so this morning, bless zz9pzza because he sat with me for almost 2 hours until we realized that the wound was self inflicted. Yes, we should have been up about 30 hours ago.

So that's over and done with.

At this time, two things. First, I'm going to update my guide to installing OTW's code that created SquidgeWorld to include a bunch of new data. Second, the code that we're running now is a year newer than it was when we went down on Sunday. Most stuff is behind he scenes, but your user ID is now in your profile, and we have the "75 tag limit per work" code in production now. So there you go.

EDIT: As soon as we were up this afternoon, things went pearshaped again with the database. I just redid everything, and ::knock wood:: let's see if it stays up.

We had a hard downtime earlier this week, and it turned out to be an issue with one of the SSDs (solid state drives, as opposed to hard disk drives) that SquidgeWorld runs on. It flailed about for a short period before settling down.

Because this is the second time that particular SSD has flailed, I've decided to pick up not only new spares, but an entirely new machine. I will be purchasing a new server, RAM, and SSDs, and before next Spring, we will be on this new hardware.

Per the details of the SquidgeWorld Monthly contest post, here are the winners for October, 2021:

Random story chosen:
On October 3rd, user nagi_schwarz posted a work called "resident bad boy moon bin" which is actually a podfic! Excited that this is our first podfic winner!

Random commenter chosen:
On October 11th, an anonymous user going by "Lawrence" posted a comment on a story by calikocat called "First Act"

All three winners won a $10 gift card of their choice based on contest details. They will be contacted soon!

So as of right now, the vast majority of singlename/singlename relationships and singlename characters should be cleaned up, as long as there were more than 3 uses. For instance, there were 34 stories out there with the tag "Oz/Xander", and that tag still exists on those stories. However, when you click on the "Oz/Xander" tag, it redirects you to the tag "Alexander "Xander" Harris/Daniel "Oz" Osbourne [Buffy the Vampire Slayer]" and all stories that were under Oz/Xander now exist under the parent tag. There were at least a dozen different "Xander" type characters out there, when in fact there should be two - Alexander "Xander" Harris and Xander "Triple X" Cage. So now most of the disparate "Xander" characters should all roll up to a single character for that fandom.

This cleanup was massive - but at least this wave of it is done.

There will continue to be cleanup as time goes on, because the database needs to be tidier than it exists today. This shouldn't mean anything to folks using the archive - just keep doing what you're doing, and that includes adding new fandoms, characters, relationships, and free-form tags as you need. If you're curious as to what we are using as guidelines, you can always check out the Wrangling Guidelines for SquidgeWorld.

Per the details of the SquidgeWorld Monthly contest post, here are the winners for September, 2021:

Random story chosen:
On September 20th, user Ceindreadh began posting a WIP called "A case of unintended consequences"

Random commenter chosen:
On September 6th, user CJAB1234 posted a comment on a story by Mirrored_Illusions called "One Foot In Front of the Other"

All three winners, Ceindreadh, CJAB1234, and Mirrored_Illusions won a $10 gift card of their choice based on contest details. They will be contacted soon!

Per the details of the SquidgeWorld Monthly Contest post, here are the winners for August, 2021:

Random story chosen:
On August 15th, user GHSamMcCallFan posted a fic called Heaven Is Your Arms

Random commenter chosen:
On August 3rd, anonymous user Rachel posted a comment on an orphaned work called The Final Posse

Both GHSamMcCallFan and Rachel have won a $10 gift card, but because Rachel's comment was on an orphaned work, the person who created the original story is unknown. Congrats GHSamMcCallFan and Rachel!

A result of SquidgeWorld's previous life as Peja's WWOMB is that "combination" fandoms exist in the archive. In The WWOMB you could choose a single fandom called "NCIS/The West Wing" instead of choosing both fandoms, and that was fine at the time.

But because of the new archive, these old multi-fandoms mean a person wanting to read an NCIS story would miss ones using the NCIS/The West Wing fandom. So, I've undertaken a project to get rid of these, even in older stories. So there are some combination fandom fics that are15 years old, but they'll be updated by me, breaking them from the single combination fandom to multiple distinct fandoms.

Questions?

Per the details of the SquidgeWorld Monthly Contest, here are the winners for July 2021:

Random story chosen:
On July 25th, user merelyafigment posted a fic called Captured

Random commenter chosen:
On July 3rd, an anonymous user going by "Laurence" left a comment on Cas's fic called In The Arms Of An Angel

Congratulations to merelyafigment, Laurence, and Cas! I will be in touch asap with details about your win and gift offering.