Hey folks,

Just wanted to let everyone know that we've got search indexing working again.  Near as I can tell, it looks like the problem was due to a couple of corrupt nodes (out of about 60,000) causing the search index function to throw an exception, and then stop dead.  I've patched the Drupal instance it so if it ever runs into this issue again, it'll log a warning and keep indexing.

At any rate, the short version is that everything should be indexed now, so search should be useful again.  We'll keep an eye on it and make sure it continues to work properly.

Bart

There was an old, unused test Drupal instance that was sitting on the server unpatched, with a couple of PHP scripts sitting in the files directory, including one that was meant to send outgoing mail.  I've removed the test instance in question and started the mail server back up.   It's always possible that I didn't get everything, so please let me know here in a comment (or in a private message) if you receive any more suspicious emails from OGA.

Thanks,

Bart

Hi.  I got word an hour or two ago that the site was sending out phishing emails to OGA user accounts.  If you have recently received a sketchy, poorly-spelled email that starts with "Your Acount is disabled for the purposes of security", you can safely assume that your account was not, in fact, disabled for the purposes of security, and under no circumstances should you provide anyone with any of your passwords, particularly information pertaining to your "Peypal" account, as the email calls it.

I saw this last night and thought I'd share:  The British Library has a Flickr account with over a million public domain images, here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary

The images are all pretty old, so how useful they'll be for your game depends entirely on what kind of aestheic you're going for, but there's a wealth of excellent stuff there.  In particular, I recommend poking through the Albums section, where you can find items that have been sorted into categories.

I did a couple test searches and the results look better now.  Solr still needs to be set up, but this should do in the meantime.

I added some smarter caching to the front page, which should make it load noticeably faster (and help ease the load on the database, which should improve responsiveness of the whole site). 

I've made a couple of minor changes to the way art tagging works:

• Spaces are now treated as breaks between tags, so you no longer have to separate them with commas.
• Hashtags (#) are filtered out automatically.

At the moment, there are in excess of 11,500 different tags.  Of these, just about half are used exactly once, and about 800 aren't being used at all (most likely because they were attached to spammy art).  To really fix OGA's tagging system, we need to do a lot more:

Ages ago, I added a button that allowed people to mark users as friends.  It didn't do a whole lot up until now.

Now, you can see your list of friends and the list of people who have friended you on the Friends and Followers tabs on your user profile, respectively.  There's also a new block on the home page that shows the latest art by your friends.  You can click on the block title to expand it into a full page view.

Note: Friend lists are currently public.  If this is a major issue for anyone, please let me know.

Bart

Just so people are aware, I moved the Private Message links from the content block in the upper left to a link on the right side of the header, per Surt's suggestion.

The web server was down for some hours today.  Didn't discover it until a few minutes ago.  We're working on figuring out why it happened.  It's almost certainly due to a configuration issue of some kind since we've updated pretty much everything.