NationStates Jolt Archive

I think this is probably the place for it...

Regarding the current NS site outage, it's causing me a significant problem (beyond just the inconvenience of not getting my NS fix) and since we're past 3 hours of downtime now with no indication of when it might be coming back up...

My problem:

I currently have a proposal in the UN proposal list that, as of 10am PST this morning, was a measly 17 approvals away from quorum (the UN Biological Weapons Ban).

This proposal in almost identical form had also already reached quorum just a few days ago with over 200 approvals and then after that occured the passage of another proposal was ruled to have made it illegal and caused it's deletion, requiring a minor rewrite to re-legalize it before re-submitting it... so this is the second time I've had to get this proposal to this point, and that's taken a lot of work.

In the roughly 6 hours before the site went down I went from 98 to 125 approvals (gained 27). If the site had remained up there is approximately a snowball's chance in hell that the proposal would not have accumulated the last 17 in the following 16 or so hours before the deadline and reached quorum. It was pretty much a lock.

So my question is this: If NS ends up being down for 8 or 10 or 12 hours is there any chance whatsoever that a site administrator can be asked to extend the voting deadline on that proposal and prevent it from being deleted for one more day in the interests of fairness?

I wouldn't ask if I'd still been 40 or 50 approvals short of quorum, and if the site ends up only being down another couple hours I won't be asking... but if the ONLY reason this proposal doesn't reach quorum by the deadline tonight is because nobody was given the opportunity to vote on it all day long because of site hardware issues that's just not right.

There are a lot of things in life that aren't right ~

On the bright side you seem very adept in lobbying for your causes. Should you need to resubmit your proposal anew contact me in the NationStates region and I shall add an endorsement of your proposal based simply on your persistence.

Mikeswill
UN Delegate
NationStates

There are several possibilities that I see:

a) The game is running, but the server software is down. Game time flows onward uninterrupted.

b) The game computer itself is down. The game is tied to the system clock, so it picks up running, ignoring the missing time. It's possible that an update was running when it went down, and that will take longer than usual to finish.

c) The game computer itself is down. The game doesn't advance, because it only counts time when the system is up.

Of these, the most likely is a). The second most likely is b). In both cases, time lost is time lost, and there's not a thing mods can do about it. Since I don't actually have access to the code, I can't tell you whether C) is likely ... but past experience tends to make me beleive that time flows ever onward.

While it is possible that admin could change it, we're talking about shuffling the core UN coding, and I doubt seriously that they would consider doing that to accomodate your inconvenience. In practical terms, I know for certain that admins are highly unlikely to have enough time today or tomorrow to do more that restart the failed services and log off.

In short, "them's the breaks."

There are a lot of things in life that aren't right ~

On the bright side you seem very adept in lobbying for your causes. Should you need to resubmit your proposal anew contact me in the NationStates region and I shall add an endorsement of your proposal based simply on your persistence.

Mikeswill
UN Delegate
NationStates

Much appreciated.

Unfortunately requiring this proposal to go through a THIRD campaign is going to be seriously starting to push my luck even with some of the delegates who have thus far been inclined to vote for this proposal. I can't just keep TGing these people over and over and over for the same proposal, I'm wearing out my welcome here, and the fact that I've done everything necessary to get it to quorum twice in a row now in the span of about a week and might STILL end up having to go through this AGAIN just because a server glitch shut down voting early this time through is really rubbing me the wrong way.

There are several possibilities that I see:

<snipitty snip>

While it is possible that admin could change it, we're talking about shuffling the core UN coding, and I doubt seriously that they would consider doing that to accomodate your inconvenience. In practical terms, I know for certain that admins are highly unlikely to have enough time today or tomorrow to do more that restart the failed services and log off.

In short, "them's the breaks."

That would surely suck.

I was hoping there was just one simple entry pertaining to that proposal that could be editted to move the expiration date for that proposal back 1 day... like "Time of expiry = T" or something... and just add a day to "T" and it's done...

I don't know if I have the energy to go through a fourth campaign in a row (I had to get that original repealed before this) and still do it properly.

Woohoo! I just got back on NS, looks like it's back up.

Hopefully this whole concern will now be rendered moot... now off to work to see if I can't make sure of that.