Comments by FergusDuniho

I can't access my game that was interrupted. I hope that timed-out games (due to the site being down) will be playable soon.

It appears that the problem with your game affects only Chu Shogi, and it has nothing to do with the game being interrupted, as I encountered the same problem when I tried to simply move pieces in Chu Shogi. What happens is that the page stops displaying partway through the menu, and it doesn't give me any clear indication of what is wrong. It looks like this is going to be a problem for Adam DeWitt to solve, as it stems from his chu settings file.

I still see time on the clocks, and I already gave additional time to all interrupted timed games. I'll do some testing later if he still hasn't moved.

My opponent sent an email to me saying he cannot move in the following log:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=McCooey%27s+Hexagonal+Chess&log=panther-tim_olena-2021-204-636

He's in check and has few legal moves. Also, the ASCII diagram he is using will not display legal moves or allow moving with the mouse. I was able to get as far as previewing a move after changing the rendering method. Not being him, I couldn't go any further.

UPDATE: Upon further testing, I found no problem with being able to move. I created a test log that just changed userids, and I successfully moved. Since the log had no time controls, the time the site spent offline had no effect on anything.

I made a test copy of one of these games, and I successfully moved in it. If Oisin had around two days left, that's consistent with him having less than a day now, because the site has been back online for a few days already. Tell him to move before his time runs out.

Testing whether posting here meets same error as posting on new server.

I have set up some cron jobs to do backups with rsync. On this server, rsync will create hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backups. These are in case it's important to revert a change to a script or page. Editors with access to the server can find these in /home/chessvariants/backups/.

The new server has a cron job to make a daily backup of the public_html directory on this server. I set up an SSH key pair to allow it to do this without a password. This will copy the /public_html/ for chessvariants.com to that for chessvariants.org. This is expected to happen at midnight EST. To be sure of what time it does it, I'll check the timestamp on the /public_html/ directory tomorrow, since I also made the script use the touch command on it when it is done updating. I still have not added commands for backing up the database. It will be important to do both together to keep their backups in sync.

It depends on a feature of MariaDB 10, but when I restored the server earlier this year, MariaDB 10 was frequently losing the connection to the database, and MariaDB 5 proved more reliable. So, I switched to MariaDB 5 and manually removed the details that required 10. On the new server, I have installed Rocky Linux 8, PHP 8, and MariaDB 10. Since it also has reverse DNS, which should make email more likely to be delivered, I have plans to make it the main server when everything is working correctly on it. For now, I have to update scripts to work with PHP 8. The new server has less storage space, but it has more than enough for the site. It has less RAM, but this server usually doesn't use even half the available RAM. Both sites have 4 cores, and the new VPS uses faster CPUs. Although the new server is on chessvariants.org, it will not support comment search until I add support for this back into the database. To start with, I will look into updating to MariaDB 10 on this server.

The touch command was used on the new server's /home/chessvariants/public_html/ directory at 12:00:14 AM EST. So, the automated daily backup worked when it was expected to. I'll look into including a backup of the database into the same script today. But since there are some different files in the folders for the database on each server, I want to fix that by making them both use the same version of MariaDB.

My attempt to update chessvariants.com to MariaDB 10 has not been successful, and I have been unable to revert to MariaDB 5.5 without errors. So, chessvariants.com is currently without a working database. At least I made a backup and copied it to chessvariants.org. If the problem on chessvariants.com continues, I might not continue with HostSlayer. As long as I have things backed up on RackNerd, I may try reinstalling the OS on HostSlayer. But for now, I have floaters in my eyes, and I need to have lunch.

Try using only alphanumeric and punctuation characters found in ASCII in your file names. Korean letters may not be recognized by all software.

I now have a script set up that runs from the backup server to make daily backups of both the /home/chessvariants/public_html/ directory and the chessvariants database every midnight at Eastern Standard Time. The script looks like this, but with the actual database password. It doesn't need the server password, because it is using an SSH key pair to connect.

#1/bin/bash
mv /root/chessvariants.sql /root/chessvariant-backup.sql
ssh [email protected] mysqldump --opt --user=root --password=XXXXXX chessvariants > /root/chessvariants.sql
/usr/bin/rsync -ae ssh --delete [email protected]:/home/chessvariants/public_html/ /home/chessvariants/public_html/
touch /home/chessvariants/public_html/
mysql --password=XXXXXX chessvariants < /root/chessvariants.sql

I'm open to feedback on how best to manage this sort of thing. One possibility is to create a new Item with the new name, we can move over the references in the database I've mentioned, and leave the old page with just a link forwarding to the new page (possibly even an automatic redirect, though I'm not sure if that'd work in a member submission view script).

The database has a RelocatedPages table. Just add an entry that includes its old URL and its new ItemID, and the 404 script will take care of the details.

See the Ai Ai tag at the bottom of the page.

I decided to rename Futashikana Shogi to Dai Shosu Shogi.

While it has apparently been done, or is in the process of being done, I would like to advise against renaming in general. When you release a game, it takes on a life of its own that may extend outside of this site. While I was working on the taginfo.php script today, I was testing it with the Ai Ai tag, and one line on the page was displaying as empty. When I tracked down what was causing this, it was the ItemID for Futashikana Shogi. Apparently, someone has programmed Futashikana Shogi for Ai Ai, where it remains known by that name and not by the name Dai Shosu Shogi.

Additionally, the name has been changed without updating the RelocatedPages table. This table should have a row added to it for each page whose URL and ItemID both change. It may be done by editing the table in PHPMyAdmin, which the main editors have the URL, userid and password for.

When the page gets rewritten, it should mention the original name and why the name was changed.

I was looking for a global way to eliminate some PHP warnings, but that requirement proved to be too restrictive. So, I have removed it.

I then tried requiring minimal argument counts instead, but even that caused problems for unary, binary, and mixed unary/binary operators. But since they seemed to work with operators requiring 3 or more arguments, I left those minimal argument count requirements in.