NationStates News

by Max Barry
Wed, 24 Apr 2024

Someone tripped over the cord that NationStates is plugged into and we went offline for nine days. That's not true. Nobody tripped over any cords. But we were offline for nine days. If we were a bank, we'd be right out of business.

When the site went down, we lost a serious amount of data. The reason it took so long to come back online is we've been putting the pieces back together. Essentially the longer we stayed down, the more data we could recover. So we did that until there was no chance of losing anything more than we had to.

Right now, we are mostly back to normal. However:

• Daily updates aren't running yet — so World Assembly Delegates cannot be replaced, and World Assembly legislation won't pass

• Trading Cards are disabled — significant work remains here. We are prioritizing recovering data over bringing Cards back online sooner. It's not yet clear how much we can recover from the last 12 months.

• Census history is empty for both nations & regions. We expect to re-insert historical data later.

• Custom Telegrams folders have generic names. Unfortunately we weren't able to recover names of custom Telegrams folders, although the messages themselves are still there.

• We are missing a lot of data from the last 12 months for Polls, Wonders, and Maps.

• RMB Search is not yet running.

This was kind of a colossal screw-up on our part, especially mine, and I'm very sorry. We haven't turned to post-mortems yet, but the triggering incident was a catastrophic hardware failure in the one disk out of ten that wasn't part of a redundant array, which turned out to be a lot more important than you'd think.

Data and services will continue to come back online over the next few days. Please note that further downtime will probably be necessary, even if we don't hit any unexpected problems.

Please report problems to us via the Technical forum, or, failing that, a Getting Help Request.

Thanks for bearing with us, and for sticking around.

Update: RMB Search is now functional.

Update: The next daily update may occur at: 11 days ago (click for your local time). It will not run earlier than this. It may be delayed, depending on the circumstances.

Update: We're having ongoing problems with our database that are preventing the timely updating of census data, which affects world and region ranks. Actual nation stats and underlying data is fine; the problem is only with our ability to rank nations on those stats.

Update: The daily update is currently running at reduced speed with no apparent problems. So yay. It will return to its regular schedule following this run, although it may run more slowly than usual while we continue to rebuild our database.

Update: World Census ranks are now updating correctly. We are still rebuilding historical data.