Happy Holidays Everyone!

The "Gifted Membership Fundraiser" for "RAOK Upgrade Brigade Group"  is now over and the results are in:

Gift points raised through our December 2009 "Gifted Membership" matching fundraiser... 4,240,000 GPs raised from 394 gifted months of Upgraded Membership and 10 gifted months of Premium Membership.

Thanks to everyone for their participation and support! The Gift Points have been transferred to RAOK with the message above.

Best wishes,
~~SM
 

Just a quick note to apologize for the approximately 1 hour 30 minutes of outage for the whole site. To resolve the initial email issue, our host rebooted the email server (which didn't need to be done), which resulted in a long system check on reboot.

The reboot process is complete and the email server is recovering from the outage and delivering a lot of email; we will open access back up to email via the site once the machine has caught up a little more and the load on the server subsides.

Our email server also houses our primary DNS server, which is what takes www.writing.com and tells your computer where to go to get to the site. At the same time, our 2ndary DNS server which serves as a backup to the primary DNS server, failed to perform it's task of resolving domains to host IPs. (Sorry for the tech speak.)

The lack of DNS servers caused "www.writing.com" to not go anywhere while the server was under reboot. Our host is working to resolve the 2ndary dns issue so that it works as it should if/when it is needed again.


[UPDATE: We've opened up access to email again. We will, however, be waiting to turn back on the "left-column email checker" until the server is further along with catch up.]


Thanks for your patience and sorry again for the downtime!
~~SM

 

Please note we are currently experiencing a problem with our email server; we are working to fix the problem and will have email available again as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience and happy holidays!
~~SM


 

The following winners for the November 2009 running of "Short Shots: Official Contest"  were chosen from the 35 entries submitted. Each entry was judged based on the criteria provided in "Short Shots: Official Contest" . Congratulations to the following three winners:

First: "Little Ships"   by Jace--New prompt at 1380461
Second: "Stranded"   by Leger~
Third: "Invalid Item"   by A Guest Visitor

Thanks to all who entered and to the judges for their time and consideration in making this decision. The contest for December is "Quotation Inspiration: Official Contest"  and it's a poetry round!

~Diane


 

Happy Holidays Everyone!

I want to note the new and improved portfolio "mouseover" (that's the little box that comes up when you put your mouse pointer over a member's little portfolio icon: The StoryMaster  

The new system is more efficient and (so far as I can tell) works much better. It also cleans up the long time issue with copying text that includes a member's portfolio icon -- it was very messy to say the least. The new copy and paste is much cleaner and easier to use.

This update has been tested on Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP with the latest MSIE, Firefox, and Google Chrome browsers... along with testing on Mac OS X running Firefox and Safari.

(...And, special thanks to catwoman (Grammy) for doing the difficult task of holding our dear little Phoebe while she slept so I could get this nifty thing I've been working on for a while now completed and done. )

Write On!
~~SM

 

[UPDATE] This situation has been resolved as we received the following update just now:

Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2009 16:38:41 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Follow Up On Today's General Internet Connectivity Issue Advisory

Dear Valued Clients,

We wanted to provide an update on the General Internet Connectivity Advisory we sent out earlier today. As
previously mentioned, this issue was outside of the INetU network and on Verizon's network. Since Verizon is a major carrier of Internet traffic, this had regional impacts across the Eastern United States. The problem behavior was consistent with a misconfiguration within Verizon's network, and Verizon has verified that the cause of the issue was human error on their part. The issue has been resolved and we are rolling traffic back to normal.

Sincerely,
Network Operations Support Staff

Original Post:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
We received this notice from our hosting provider and I thought I would pass it along should anyone be feeling slowness today. (Slowness on the internet, not just in their day. )

Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2009 12:30:54 -0500 (EST)
From: INetU Network Operations
Subject: Important - General Internet Connectivity Issue Advisory

Dear Valued Clients,

There are general Internet connectivity issues on the Internet right now that some of you may be
experiencing in trying to connect to your servers. These issues are not on the INetU network, but they
are impacting connectivity in the Eastern United States in general. The issues are centered around
Verizon. As a precaution, we have routed all traffic away from our Verizon connection for the duration
of the issue. However, people using Verizon as their local Internet provider or Internet traffic that
is routed through Verizon~Rs network may see issues while Verizon fixes the problem.

We will be in touch with more information as the issue becomes resolved.

Sincerely,
Network Operations Support Staff


So, hopefully this isn't really affecting things here, but may affect other online activities.

~~SM
 

The emoticons area of the WritingML help has been updated.

It includes this new doo-hickey: List of WDC Emoticons

Which reminds me... I've added these WritingML tags:

{code:emoticons} = List of WDC Emoticons

{code:writingml} = WritingML Help



~~SM

 

Happy Holidays, Members!

We're proud to release the following 37 new holiday emoticons!
Thanks for all of your requests and suggestions!


dreidel =
gingerbread =
menorah =
santahat =
snowman =
stardavid =
xmastree =

candycaneR =
candycaneG =

stockingB =
stockingG =
stockingR =
stockingV =

ornament1B =
ornament1G =
ornament1R =
ornament1S =
ornament1V =
ornament1Y =

ornament2B =
ornament2G =
ornament2R =
ornament2S =
ornament2V =
ornament2Y =

ornament3B =
ornament3G =
ornament3R =
ornament3S =
ornament3V =
ornament3Y =

ornament4B =
ornament4G =
ornament4R =
ornament4S =
ornament4V =
ornament4Y =

PLUS:
quill =
pencil =

And since we know you want a "writing" emoticon, {e:writing} gets you the


Thanks The StoryMistress !


Enjoy!
~~SM