What news from the Kingdom?

[fronobulax]

It may be a bit of a cheap shot asking someone here for news that is buzzing over at GD, but since there are scripts that use third party sources/sites it seems like a legitimate question and allows me to continue to avoid GD.

When I go to kBay it shows all of the auctions have less than a minute to run. When I look at my auctions it seems as if the "problem" has persisted since at least April 16. Is kBay still in business? Has there been an announcement concerning status or future plans? Perhaps this is the reason why folks are reporting OCD Inventory Control is not "sending" things?

The JickenWings Display Case Database has not been updated since 2013-02-11 or thereabouts. Similar questions apply - are there status updates beyond the several week old message at the site?

There are scripts to be revised, depending upon the answers.

Thanks.

 

[Winterbay]

Well, the Jicken Wings web page states:

She Can't Take Much More, Cap'n
[SIZE=-2]Posted 2013-02-11 10:54:45[/SIZE]Our web host has informed us that the nightly DCDB update script has been putting a little too much load on our shared server. DC updates have been disabled until we balance the load a little better, which will hopefully be soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!
- Lilac (#310734)

Edit: Which I note that you had already seen...

Edit, edit: A quick search of GD shows no posts regarding those two services in quite a while.

 

[fewyn]

Yeah I've been looking for updates on kbay and I can't find anything about it :/

 

[Bale]

Oh dear goodness. Thank you for this post. I only get my feet wet at GD so I could easily miss this even if it was there.

 

[xKiv]

I actually waste entirely too much time in the GD, and still haven't seen anything on either of the two. I only knew about jickenwings because I randomly went there to check my standing, and I only use kbay to time-arrow myself (which works).

 

[Winterbay]

I've sent a message to Turias about kBay. I'll see what kind of response I get.

 

[Theraze]

Well, Turias hasn't logged into KoL since 4/11, so that might be why kBay is having issues... might be a vacation or something similar.

 

[fronobulax]

KBay seems to be back and functioning normally. Have not heard what happened or why. Just observing that it sent me auction proceeds and seems to have active auctions.

I have not seen anything concerning the Jicken Wings Display Case Database. I would hope that they intend to revive it but the lack of news suggests they may be abandoning it :-(

 

[xKiv]

Wasn't JickenWings "gone" for a very long time several times already?

 

[fronobulax]

Wasn't JickenWings "gone" for a very long time several times already?

Without going into massive searches to confirm my memory this time seems different because: a) it has gone on longer than the previous outages and b) there were one or two interim announcements during the previous outages that were kind of reassuring. Display Case Management has become a self-created mini-game ("The Mall is Not the Game") for me.

 

[xKiv]

By "very long time" I meant many months, without announcements. This has only been 2.5 months since the (first? only?) announcement.
The 2006-10-20 announcement was *during* one "very long time". And I don't think there was even a "it's now working" announcement for that.

And since this outage is caused by the DCDB using too much CPU on the servers, it probably won't be easy to fix at all ...

 

[fronobulax]

2006 may pre-date my obsession with the display case because I don't recall that long a silence. Professionally, I have rejiggered things many times so that they would work within the available resources so I don't see the outage as a technical problem as much as it is a a time and money problem. I'm sure, for example, that moving from a shared to a dedicated server should be trivial and would remove the limit because the server is shared, but it would also cost JickenWings more in Real Money. Depending upon the details of their script and the underlying database, it may be possible to tune one or both for better performance during import. But that requires some technical knowledge that might not be present within the organization or available at a cost they can afford. I'm not knocking JickenWings at all and I thank them for offering a free service to the community, but what makes this hard to fix is almost certainly economics and not technology. And yes, if someone from JickenWings was willing to trust me I would certainly put my time where my mouth is (to paraphrase a cliche).

TL;DR - I'm sure it is an easy technical fix. Getting the time, money and expertise to fix it is difficult. IMO. YMMV.

 

[xKiv]

2006-10-20

This predates my KoL involvement. I meant 2010-06-20.

 

[fronobulax]

Bump.

kBay has been back and running.

Does anybody know what Jicken Wings intends to do? Any public statements or someone in the clan or someone who knows someone? The future availability of the Display Case database determines whether I bother to move some scripts to SVN or not.

Thank you.