NationStates Jolt Archive

What's up with Jolt nowadays? It seems like it takes a dump/collapse/die every few hours, every single day. I saw in the II forum that there was a 13 hour gap between posts! From 10.34 PM to 11.40 AM (GMT +1). Is there a massive update going on or is it just breaking down? Any answers would be much appreciated.

It could well be that there has been a recent rush of posting or joining members in regular Jolt, outside of NS, that are slowing down the server. However, I know that last night the link to the forums from NS was down, and I couldn't even log in to NS as my regular nation, I had to log in as a puppet. This was an error in the site, not in Jolt, and had to do with people being unable to access the forums from NS or maybe even not being able to log in, rather than Jolt being down.

I don't know what caused this, because I'm not a technical wizard, but I expect it's what caused the huge gap between posts.

Jolt is going through a period of advanced suckiness right now, and they have not chosen to share the reason why. After the first day it happened, we received notification that "the problem has been solved". Apparently not.

Jolt is not a huge outfit, and they do not offer 24/7 support. Consequently, when the system borks after close-of-business or on a weekend, they fix it when they notice it or when they're next back in the office.

The service is free to you, folks, so we don't have a lot of leverage here. 'Fraid you'll have to live with the foibles for now.

This was an error in the site, not in Jolt, and had to do with people being unable to access the forums from NS or maybe even not being able to log in, rather than Jolt being down.
A) Jolt hosts both the game and the forums, though on two different servers. Jolt wasn't "down", but portions of its services were. The outage did not appear to have any relationship to larger than usual bandwidth requests.

B) The Jolt forums were completely down, possibly due to a failure in the database engine (or the links to it). This has been an ongoing sporadic issue for months, and appears to have metasticized into something more significant. It wasn't just the NationStates portion.

C) There were no problems with the game portion, apart from an internal link to the forums engine slwoing things down. I don't know what your issue was, but yours is the only report. Anyone using direct links to the forums (rather than the game link) had the same outage problem.

Thanks for the answer Fris. So I guess we'll just have to wait and hope for better times...?

snip

Okay, thanks. I didn't know Jolt had taken over hosting the site as well as the forums.

My problem was one I have everytime the forums are down and the site isn't (Namely, anytime I load up the main site and can't see the 'five most recent threads' section). I can't log into Haraki, but I can for my puppet nation. It's strange. The site works fine, albeit slower than usual, for the other nation, but just won't log me in as Haraki. Not a big problem since it went away once everything was back up, and the forums were down anyway.

Thanks for the answers, Fris. Now I'm slightly less technically-illiterate about the game.

(...)You know, what if NationStates 2 is also hosted on Jolt's (bad) servers, and since NationStates 2 is going to be pay-to-play, I'd feel ripped off if I cannot access a game I pay for. That'd be almost theft, not giving 24/7 support while asking money for a cheap service you're offering.

I find it very hard to imagine Jolt will actually prepare and maintain a dedicated server just for NationStates 2. Let's take the mean of and go with $15 per month (since the price ranges between $10 and $20), and we have structural errors like we have now, I don't think it is responsible to host it here. Or am I speaking about things best left unspoken?

Support for a paid game is likely to be different than support for a free game. You speculations are nothing more than that. Since you're NOT paying for this one, let's stick to the issues at hand.

Don't certain members of the main Jolt forums pay for extra features on their accounts or something? Don't they get told what's going on?

They get avatars. I doubt that entitles them to administrator level information.

more jolt weirdness

http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=10254791&postcount=9

that post of mine shows up in the thread itself, but not the forum...

They get avatars. I doubt that entitles them to administrator level information.

Being told whether the staff are aware of and working on the problem, and a rough estimation of how long it could take to repair, isn't exactly 'administrator level information' -- it's a courtesy which a great many forums, website and online games afford their users. Even NS, when there is a problem with the game itself, the staff will generally tell us on the forums. It would just show that if nothing else, Jolt at least gives a damn.

Is it just me or is Jolt becoming increasingly slow?

I remember the old server, that was pretty bad. However, Jolt is going in that direction with the constant break-downs etc.

Something needs to be done.