Howdy, gang. I wanted to give everybody a very quick update about the downtime that happened over the weekend of August 2-3, because it took everybody - including us! - by surprise.

The short answer: it was a weird billing error.

For now, I want to avoid going into more detail until I know more; right now, I only have part of the story.

We apologize for the outage. We understand that in order to be taken seriously by the RPG community, we need to have high availability. Sometimes, stuff happens of course; but this looks like it might be the sort of stuff that we can avoid going forward. We appreciate that NGA has become a home for so many of you, and we'll do what we can to keep improving. That means adding tools and features, of course; but it also means resolving issues like this so they don't pop up again going forward.

Thanks for helping us grow so much in under a year. Part of that quick growth is some inevitable growing pains, unfortunately. We're already working to minimize or eliminate these sorts of risks and challenges going forward.

-- Fire

I'm just glad the site is back up now! I'd like to offer a heartfelt thank you to all the people who keep this site running.

Thanks for keeping such a great site going! We've slowly grown in popularity, and a big thanks to both our ambassadors at other forums who let people know about us, and our Site Administrators and Moderators for doing a bang-up job in keeping this place a respectful and open place!

I'm a constant on the "Duels of the Planeswalker" side and really enjoy NGA as a whole! I didn't know what to do with myself during the outage (lol) but I am glad it is back up! If there was any real "complaint" that I have is that the site can be really slow loading half the time. Other than that minor inconvenience I call this my "home".

I'm very happy that you guys recognize the importance of site reliability! What a great bunch, and thanks for all you do!

Given the importance of this forum to many people, we've decided to institute an emergency broadcast system in case of future mishaps. In the event of a system failure, please tune your radios to WNGA and listen for this emergency signal.

man, I've trained my forum expectations on the mothership. random day-long downtimes are a mild inconvenience at best.

Stuff happens. I understand and my guess is that most everyone else does too.

Occasional stuff does indeed happen.

But my forum community home going on years completely died and fell apart because of repeat outages. After the near-extinction of our old Vorthos community, I'd be terribly sad to lose this place and the M:EM, too.

one thing that might be nice would be to use the off-site NGA presence such as the Twitter account to inform people what's going on when things go down. I tweeted at the account but I don't think anyone's actually manning it right now.

I went to the Mothership flavor forum hoping for info.

So did I. I found it in the mothership DotP forum when I finally went "What, what was NGA's most active section?"

Due to my current work schedule by the time I was home and could actually see what you had messaged to the twitter, the boards were already online.

We are definitely pushing to have a bigger social media footprint though, both for contact ease and for just getting our presence out there. I'm trying to get a few of the staff into getting more tweeting going on, we've been talking about a Tumblr for some of the lengthier blog projects we'd like to tinker with, and I dont know if we'll do the whole Facebook thing but its always there as well.

get "door" to manage your twitter he loves twitter

sorry if that sounded accusatory, it wasn't meant to be. I understand twitter's not really the focus here, was just the only place I could think of to contact staff.

I created a Steam group yesterday.
NGA is Down.
It's public so feel free to join up so we can have an avenue of communication if this happens again.

I checked the Twitter route, which is funny, because while I do have twitter, I use it next to never. Still, that's kinda become my "go-to" checking spot for downtimes due to Magic Online.

You made a dedicated steam group specifically for when a niche internet forum doesn't work?
Wouldn't it be easier to just use the general steam group for NGA?

Now I'm making a Steam group called Mown is Hassling Me.