tabacco

I still have the titanium spork on my desk, just so you know!

That was the fail narwhal, right? That was after my time, since it was during Monkey Island, but I think Gary (old TTG graphic designer) did that one

Yeah, I left Telltale in 2009, so we're probably talking 2008 or so.

Wait wait wait, there used to be a downtime page? Wow, that would've been nice to have. I think it may have been the "Oh, Crumbs" page. 'Oh Crumbs' was just for 404s. There used to be a friendly page that would show up while Apache was down, but I guess it broke or got removed.

The original idea was, because we didn't have a second server to replicate mysql to, we had to stop mysqld to get a consistent nightly backup. At the time it was pretty quick (maybe 15 minutes) so we sort of called it 'okay for now' and moved on. From what you described, I'm guessing other stuff has been tacked into that time window, because the original backup job pretty much did "stop apache, start lighttpd (which served the downtime page), mysqldump, stop lighttpd, start apache". Not exactly elegant, but it worked okay.

Wow, I haven't seen you post about Telltale site issues in YEARS. Déjà vu is so strong here I'm getting vertigo! I post about site issues on the Thumbs forums now

vBulletin's licensing got weird with version 4. And honestly, at this point, I'm much happier with IP.Board (which we use for Idle Thumbs). From the admin side, it's easier to use, and it has better SSO support should we need it (the SSO in the telltale forums was a hack based on reverse-engineering vB's auth code). But also it retains the more manageable "Buy once, then pay maintenance for upgrades" licensing of vB from the Jelsoft days.

Wow, was it really up to four hours? That downtime system was a really quick hack for db backups that was definitely not scalable. I'm sad it lasted that long without someone investing in a proper replication system for the database.

Just so you know, the 1280x1024 milkman wallpaper seems to be a corrupt jpeg. Also, where's the 1600x1200 love?

I'm guessing Klint is the web guy, sinec the emails are all From: him

No-one loves me

Nice, a feed has appeared! You really need to Alias news.php to something nicer though