Scribblit

New Community

2008-04-16T19:15:29Z

Hi Everyone.

In order to avoid all confusion I've set up a new community for TSFKAS - tsfkas - I ask that all members here join that community and that any new posts to be made are made in that community.

Kit has been set up as a maintainer there and once he accepts I will remove myself from that community as a maintainer and you'll be set! :)

Thanks again everyone for your support.

scribblit @ 2008-04-12T09:44:00

2008-04-11T23:46:14Z

My scriblit account has disappeared. It says my username is not found. But I have the confirmation emails with my user name in them. Anyone know what may have happened? Or who can fix my problem? Thanks.

Big Big Update!

2008-04-07T23:33:23Z

Hi Everyone! I have a big announcement to make.

Due to personal issues as well as a waning interest in maintaining this site, I am handing over the project to my lovely SysOp, Kit. There is one exception to this - the name will be changed.

My main reasons for doing this have to do with the stress involved. I was feeling overwhelmed with everything and felt that I could not provide the level of service that I wanted to and thought you all deserved. After consulting with Kit he agreed to take over the site with the above exception.

The service will remain the same but it will have a new name and theme. Everyone who donated to have an account will remain early account holders. Everyone who is a beta tester retain their account status. The service itself will remain the same other than having a new name.

Kit's interest and desire to provide a good service rivals that of my own excitement earlier on in the project and I know he will do a good job.

Thank you everyone for your support for the past .... year almost and I hope you will continue to support Kit in getting the site off the ground!

Please watch scribblit as Kit will be making a post of his own.

Explanations

2008-03-13T19:39:57Z

Because of the outcry at my decision to remove accounts that were created without permission I am making a new post to address issues that have been brought up in the comments in my previous post.

You are not seeing it from your customer's point of view
I realize that it may appear that way but this is not the case. The site at this time, is not open to the public. There has always been a policy that beta testers and those who donated were not to invite other people to join. We have hashed this out on Scribblit itself with those who are actually part of the beta test and those that donated that invitations are not to be sent out unless there was an exception and permission given by me.

You shouldn't have had the invitation page up to begin with
Perhaps however with the problems we have been having with the servers and having to move everyone around, we have missed a few journals - these things happen - and so to make things easier on ourselves, we sent out invitations to those who were supposed to have them and did not get them. Should we have turned off the page when we were done with that? Probably but again I refer you to point #1 where the site is not open to the public and users were told not to invite people.

You're just going on a big powertrip and you don't care about your customers
This couldn't be farther from the truth. Every decision I make about this site is made in an effort to make it the best site it can be for everyone. However, it seems that some people are not realizing just how much work there is to do to get this site up and running. And while it may appear that we're not working on getting things fixed, the fact is, we are. We know about a lot of the issues and are working to get them fixed as quickly as possible. Keeping a smaller userbase on the site while it is still in testing generally makes it easier if we do have to back everything up and move everything around. And the faster we can get the problems fixed the sooner the site will be open to the public.

Let me reiterate a few things:
1) I have not nor will I ever delete journals randomly. Should a journal need to be deleted there will be a specific reason for it and the owner will be notified.
2) I have made no promises that there wouldn't be bumps in the road during the beta testing. Bumps and mistakes happen and in all honesty, should be expected when something is not fully functioning as desired. The people running this site are only human after all.
3) I care a great deal about the success of this project. I have been working on it for almost a year. I would have loved to have gotten it up and running and ready for January - I want to welcome everyone who wants to be there to the site. This site is my baby and I want it to succeed as much as anyone who is supporting this site. It was never my intention to do anything that would put people off - granted, I'm not going to be able to please everyone all the time but it has always been my intention to be as clear and transparent and available as possible.

What's going to happen to the journals then?
I have thought about this while typing up this entry and while reading the responses to my previous post. An investigation will still be done to determine the number of accounts that have been created since the beginning of March. If there is sufficient evidence that these accounts are not in fact spam account setups then these accounts will be suspended until the site is open. If it appears that the journals created have been the work of someone squatting on names or something similar then appropriate action will be taken (The squatted upon names will be deleted and purged so that they will be available to legitimate users when the site is open.)

For any user (beta tester or early contributer) who has sent out an invitation when they shouldn't have, your account will be suspended for an amount of time yet to be determined.

This is a reminder to all users: just because the invitation page may exist does not give you permission to invite people. And as I stated previously, we will be disabling it so this does not happen again.

As usual, I always encourage civil discussion but please keep it civil. I do not want to resort to disallowing anonymous comments due to someone saying something inappropriate.

[edit 5:08pm]
One last clarification, I apologize for leaving this out.

Beta testers were allowed to create secondary accounts for themselves. If you are curious as to whether or not you should be deleting that account you do not need to, the problem was with people inviting outside the beta tester/early contributor circle.

Also, only accounts that have been created from March 1/2008 will be examined.

[edit 5:16pm]
And one last thing. Since a number of people are claiming that it was never explicitly stated that users were not to send out invitations I would like to direct you to this post calling for more beta testers. Take note of the first point:

Do not create an account for yourself or for anyone else. If the account creation page is active it means that I am working on fixing the error that exists with it. DO NOT create an account

Common sense would dictate that one would extend such a rule to the invitations page since it clearly states not to create an account for anyone else.

Switcheroo #2 and other issues

2008-03-13T14:54:37Z

First off, please make sure that your journals are backed up - here I am referring to SI Main. We are going to be working on the switcheroo over the next couple of days and hopefully we will be up and running again soon!

Secondly and perhaps most importantly DO NOT GIVE OUT INVITATION CODES. The site is not open to the public. Just because you have access to the invitation page does not mean you are allowed to use it. Once again, the site is not open to the public so invitation codes should not have been sent out. If you have sent out invitation codes you can inform those people that their accounts will be deleted and purged and they can recreate them when the site is live. And sadly, we will be revoking access to the invitation page so that this does not happen again.

[edit 2:42pm]
Apparently I was not clear enough and for that I apologize.

We will be doing an investigation into accounts that have been created without permission. One user has admitted already that they have been sending out invitations and this is unacceptable.

I realize that some people may find this rule to be a bit of overkill however with all of the problems we have been having and in an effort to keep things simple while we resolve the problems, the site was to remain closed. The site is closed. What this means is that people should NOT have been sending out invitations. Do not continue to send out invitations.

Should the invitation page be removed? Yes however in the process of updating and moving servers we needed the page to get everyone back up and running.

The fact of the matter is, those that have been created in March will be removed. Anything before that will be investigated.

If you have any concerns please email me at scribblit @ yahoo.ca.

[edit 3:34pm]
Please see my most recent post for more information and what will be done about the mis-created accounts.

Question?

2008-03-09T05:18:28Z

Is anyone else suddenly not getting comment notifs from Beta? I'm not, on any of my journals. Anyone know of this issue?

Switcheroo #2

2008-03-05T15:09:35Z

Hi everyone!

I realize you haven't had an update in a while and that things are wonky all around. For both of those things I apologize.

We have had very little luck with our hosting company resolving the problem with the server and getting the code up and running so we are moving to a new company. The server should be set up later today and we will then work on getting the code installed there.

What does this mean for you? It means you need to back up you journals again! Please make sure you back up at both SI:Main and SI:Beta just to be on the safe side. At the moment I do not have a timeframe for when the other server will be taken down but it will not be before a week from now (March 12 - good grief it's March already?).

All of that being said, I really appreciate your patience and I am looking forward to the site opening soon!

I'm sorry again for the inconvenience and as soon as I know for sure when the other server will be taken down I will update again!

Also, please make sure to spread the word so that everyone who has an account knows! Link to this post if you must!

Beta issues

2008-02-20T11:16:35Z

Is it just me or has beta been down since yesterday afternoon? At around 4:30 PM EST yesterday 2/19, I tried to log in and the main page wouldn't load. In fact, nothing would. Firefox kept giving me their "Unable to connect

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.beta.scribblit.com" error message. I thought it'd fix itself in a few hours like the last time beta sporadically went down, but it's 6:15 AM EST 2/20 and still nothing.

What's going on?

beta.scribblit.com

2008-02-08T21:40:11Z

I have gotten a couple of reports from people (as well as trying it out for myself) that the various parts of beta.scribblit.com that were not working are now working.

I tried for myself with a couple of accounts and was able to successfully update my profile and access the update page.

Could those of you who were having problems please try accessing the various parts of the site and let me know if you are still having problems? There are a number of pages that are not up yet (paidaccounts/ support/ etc) and they will give you 404 errors and that's fine. I'm referring to pages that were taking a very long time to load.

Please leave a comment with your operating system and browser and whether or not it is now working for you. Also, please leave any issues you are having with SI Main as well.

Thanks guys!

scribblit @ 2008-02-02T06:13:00

2008-02-02T11:06:04Z

Just a reminder to everyone to make sure they have backed up everything from their accounts on scribblit.com. You can use a tool like ljarchive to accomplish this.

Please make sure you have it done by 10pm EST tonight as tomorrow I will be starting the reinstall on scribblit.com in an effort to discover what the problem(s) is/are on the beta site.

Please feel free to link to this post or cross-post this information. The more people who know, the happier we'll be as we can all get our journals backed up. :)

Back up your data!

2008-01-25T23:27:33Z

In an effort to figure out what is wrong with beta.scribblit.com we are going to attempt to install the Livejournal Code that is currently on beta.scribblit.com on the original server where www.scribblit.com currently is.

What this means is that the current installation at www.scribblit.com will be wiped clean and replaced with the version that is currently running on beta.scribblit.com. We are doing this in an effort to see if the problem really is with the code or with something on the server itself.

All of that being said, you will need to back up all of your entries. We will have a backup of the site as well but you need to make sure that anything you want saved is saved. We will be doing this wipe next weekend, Feb 2-3 so you have a week to get everything saved.

I will be posting this in various places to make sure that everyone finds out. Please spread the word as well so that anyone who has an account there can save their data.

Thanks guys!

Slowness

2008-01-22T18:00:07Z

I know that people on windows machines are experiencing slowness with accessing beta.scribblit.com - pages are not loading completely and just hang but I need to know if this is happening to people on NON-Windows machines as well. I know some people are not having problems but if you run a non-windows machine and are having problems please leave a comment with your OS.

Thanks!

Logging in?

2008-01-14T03:25:45Z

Is anyone else having problems logging into beta scribblit? I click on "log in" and put in my username and password, but it does not log me in.

Scribblit.com Beta???

2008-01-05T19:57:47Z

There appears to be some confusion with regards to "Scribblit Beta" and I'd like to offer some clarification on that now.

I first established the site on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) which I knew would not be the permanent home of scribblit.com simply because it did not have the resources for the site. Scribblit.com is currently pointed to the VPS which is where I first started out. I have since rented a dedicated server which will be the permanent home for scribblit.com.

Because of some problems we had on scribblit.com, beta.scribblit.com was set up on the dedicated server and we started with a clean installation of the source code. beta.scribblit.com will eventually become the permanent home and the address will return to www.scribblit.com.

Now, because of the problems we had on scribblit.com we couldn't move the database over and this is why accounts need to be recreated on the new site.

All of that being said, invitations to create an account were sent out to all users on the original scribblit site to set up an account on beta.scribblit.com. Unfortunately it appears that many people did not receive these emails for whatever reason so I am working on getting the invitations sent out to those who did not receive them. If you are an early contributor (either through donation or as a beta-tester) please leave a comment with your username and email address and I will send you an invitation to get your account created on beta.scribblit.com.

Last but not least, I am hoping to open the site up to free account creation very shortly. We have one major kink to work out and get the site schemes back up but the site will hopefully be ready to go shortly!

Thanks for your patience and I hope I have cleared up some of the confusion. As always, if you have any questions, please leave a comment.

Scribblit or Beta?

2008-01-05T08:10:42Z

I've looked through old posts but either the answer to this was never posted or I'm looking right over it (which is probably the case). Everyone who already has an account at Scribblit was invited to Beta but which one is going to be the real deal in the end? I'm assuming it's Scribblit but you know what happens when you assume.

Also what is going to happen to the journals created at beta if it's Scribblit that's going to go live? Are the people who were invited and made accounts there going to be deleted and they can make an account at Scribblit or are they basically reserving a name?

Already?

2008-01-05T02:35:34Z

Scribblit isn't even open to the public yet and already there is a new site called Scribbld.

I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

scribblit @ 2007-12-28T18:17:00

2007-12-28T16:22:09Z

Hi! I was wondering whether I'm the only who's having problems trying to log onto Beta? Every time I try to log in with my user name and password, the page just reloads and throws me over to the home page without ever logging me in. :/ Is it something I'm doing or is there something going on on Beta right now?

edit:

I've also run into trouble with trying to create a layer to enable me to use Smooth Sailing. I've tried to do the same as I did with nonbeta succesfully, but for some reason it refuses to work. -.- Is anyone else using the same thing? Any advice on it? I'm out of ideas. :/

scribblit @ 2007-12-10T16:05:00

2007-12-10T21:10:00Z

I have had a couple of questions about accounts that have been suspended and I will address them now.

While working on getting moved over to our permanent home, account creation had been turned on to allow the beta testers to recreate their accounts on the new machine. During this time approximately 100 accounts were created and linked to only 4 email addresses.

My ever diligent SysOp noticed this and flagged these accounts as spam accounts and suspended them. Account creation was not turned on for the general public it was intended to be for beta users only. At any rate, these accounts will be deleted and purged and should you wish to use the service you will need to recreate them when the site is open.

Account creation is currently set to invitation only and invitations at this time are only being extended to beta testers and those who donated during the fundraiser.

Do not post asking for an invitation, you will not get one. Do not hound beta-testers for an invitation, you will not get one.

I know all of you are excited and we are too. We're working as hard as we can to get everything ready to open up and all we ask for is some patience.

Random friending at the beta site

2007-12-07T15:22:39Z

Hi all, I'm just getting started at the beta site, and you may get notified that you have been friended by this weird "catecumen" you don't even know. My apologies if anyone is offended. I'm doing some random friending as a test. If you are friended and/or defriended, please do not take it personally.

Oh fun...

2007-12-05T15:13:50Z

Well apparently I am very lucky at home - it is still redirecting incorrectly here at work. We will continue to investigate this. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Site Status

2007-12-05T05:36:16Z

The site is currently working for me on both Firefox and Internet Explorer. If it is still not working for you please try clearing out your cache and attempting it again.

Also note that it can take 48-72 hours in extreme situations for the nameservers to propagate so it is possible for the site to be working for some people and not others.

scribblit @ 2007-12-04T08:45:00

2007-12-04T13:38:59Z

There may be some downtime on the site today as we're are doing some more work on it. It should be back up late tonight or tomorrow.

scribblit @ 2007-11-30T10:07:00

2007-11-30T15:12:50Z

The site is down. I am aware of this. There is no need to send me an email at this time.

We are currently working on getting the site moved over to the new server so of course there will be hiccups.

Those of you who donated to receive early contributor accounts did so with the knowledge that the site is still in beta-testing and that there would still be errors. This is one of those times.

[edit 10:23am]
The nameservers have been adjusted and the site should be back up later today or tomorrow.

site down?

2007-11-29T22:46:22Z

Is anyone else have trouble access the site right now? Firefox is giving me a "Server not found" error.

ETA: 7:17 PST and still no luck.

Scribblit loading issues?

2007-10-24T06:09:41Z

I have not been able to log on for the last half hour. Neither of my browsers can access the site. Is anyone else having similar problems?