SquidgeWorld Archive

As we've done sometimes in the past, I feel like this year we need something to celebrate. So I've put together a giveaway!

All you have to do is guess the number words of published, unhidden works (not comments, not summaries, not pre or post work notes - just story text itself) here on SquidgeWorld as of December 1st, 2021. As a guideline, there are more than 200,000,000 words and less than 250,000,000 words in total. Your job is to guess! And when you have a guess, submit it via the form linked below.

Click here to get to the form 

The fine print:
Only one guess per email address is accepted. If you submit more than one answer, only your most recent submission (the one dated closest to December 24th, 2021) will be counted.
Submissions are open from the time this is posted (December 2nd, 2021) until December 24th, 2021 00:01
In the event two people submit the correct answer, the earliest submission is the winner.
In the event the correct answer is not guessed but two people are both equidistant from the winning number, the earlier submission of the two is the winner.
In order to submit you should have a SquidgeWorld Archive account, though it's not required.
The only submissions that count are the ones that go through the form located at https://form.jotform.com/213354852505050

The winner receives a $50 gift card of their choice (usually Amazon or Apple/iTunes, but it's their choice & dependent on their locale).

Get guessing!

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

Random story chosen:
On November 2nd, user mbozzo posted a work called "The Roman Snare".

Random commenter chosen:
On November 4th, user barbaravitoriatp posted a comment on a story by Thesseli called "She Just Wouldn't Understand". This fic is one of our oldest, from 2004!

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

We had a short downtime (about 1pm Pacific to 3:45pm Pacific) but are back up and running. If you see anything odd, please tell me!

Twice in the last two hours the server running SquidgeWorld bombed. I have no idea why, because there are no indicators. I've made some adjustments and we're back up. Please know there might be connectivity issues if this issue comes back.

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.