Hogwarts Live Blog

Believe it or not, the recent slowness this week is not related to any hardware or software problems on the server. From what I can tell the network block that the server is a part of has been under constant attack for the last several days. At this moment I do not believe that the HogwartsLive server is being directly targeted by the attackers, just happens to be the innocent bystanders in someone else's war.

We have a support ticket submitted to the collocation facility asking them to do something about this incredible latency, but as of yet they seem to be able to do nothing.

As part of the restructuring to make HL more efficient both speed-wise and resources-wise, guild requirements have been altered a bit.

A player still needs to be at least a Fourthyear in order to make a new guild, however...a guild MUST have at least 7 members IN ADDITION TO the Founder in order for the vaults to appear and be accessible. If membership drops below 7, the vault disappears. ADDED: This also means that the auto-rewards will not be issued to guild members in a guild unless the membership is at or above the required 7. Guilds are not there for single players to amass their own personal fortunes.

I would suggest that leaders of smaller clans speak with other smaller clan leaders and work out some kind of merge operation.

Vessa's Gem Exchange has also been removed until further notice.

And as your one and only warning:

If you create alternate accounts for the sole purpose of reaching the required membership, your guild will be deleted and you will NOT get your gold or gems back. I WILL be checking guilds for this.

Yes, I know that everyone is getting stuck in Call Stack Errors. I have emailed Edmund and so we just have to be patient and wait until he can stop RL to come fix it for us. Please don't petition anymore.

As you have probably noticed, because some of the villages were removed, many people couldn't access their dwellings in them. Finally, we have moved all those dwellings to Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade: all flats and shacks were moved to Diagon Alley, and all farmhouses and castles were moved to Hogsmeade. Every dwelling from Knockturn Alley, the Ministry of Magic, Spinner's End, Number 12 Grimmauld Place, Ottery St. Catchpole, and Mount Olympus has been moved manually. Because we did this the long way, there might be a few mistakes, so if you can't find your shack or flat in Diagon Alley it might have mistakenly been moved to Hogsmeade (and vice versa), so before you go and petition that, please check around. If you DO have any problems or cannot find your dwelling, please petition and we'll look into it.

We are aware that the chats are messing up. Edmund has been working on it and it should be resolved soon. If you are experiencing these problems, you can go into your Preferences and turn the live chat off. We will make an announcement when it has been fixed.

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, or whatever other holiday you celebrate. A belated congratulations to Poizun Acerbity who won the Hill of Beans Candy raffle and won an amazing 23,685 bertie botts beans!

Since we are getting new players, I'm posting the site rules again so no one has any excuse to not follow them. This is the version used by all Staff so please do not question if it is not in another part of the site. And please be sure to read through them even if you think you already know what they are; something might have changed.

Reasons for muting:

1. Fighting: I do not mean RP fighting, I mean verbal assaults. Violence is NOT muteable unless it is a REAL threat. Roleplaying fighting is not a threat.
2. Sex and PDA: Use your common sense- we are a PG 13 site, half of the things done here should not be done and this WILL be enforced. NO innuendo, and no naming of private body parts.
3. Evading the Filter: If a word shows up as !@#$ when it posts, do NOT change it so others can read it. Using foreign languages in open chat is also considered evading. Don't do it. And don't try to filter yourself. Just type what you want to say and let the filter do its job.
4. Drugs, alcohol and other bannable subjects: Any reference to illegal drugs, alcohol use other than site-related, cutting, suicide or other forms of self-mutilation will not be tolerated. There is no need for any of that on this site.
5. Rape: This will NOT happen on this site. This includes any references to rape.
6. SPAM: Ok here is the tuffy. We have said before that anything more then 3 characters is SPAM. But in all reality we do NOT mute for this. Only if the person is taking it to extremes such as:.
!Dementor AuroraBorealis says, "dfkjlsdhgkjfkjghfmnvcm,vnfkghrouityerioutyjkgvnmc,vnfdj"
Get the point? Good.. However, please try to keep extra letters/symbols to a minimum. It CAN mess the page up for some players. Smilies are included in the no more than 3 guideline.
7. Link SPAM and Messenger addresses and emails: This includes other personal info such as phone numbers, addresses, myspace profiles, etc. Some people post these things in open chats. They are not to be there. If you want to give it to a friend that ASKS for it, OWL it. And no random owling of players to advertise other sites. We ban for that. This is why we have a link exchange. Please use it.
8. Advertising your clan in open chat: This is only allowed in the clan waiting area. It has no place in Diagon or Hogwarts or any other village.
9. Personal Attacks: This is the offense that makes me angry, bringing someones personal life onto this site to attack them. Leave outside information outside.
10. Cheating and exploitation of glitches: If you find a glitch or bug in the game, please petition it. If you are caught telling other players of the glitch, you may be muted and/or banned.

In the end, listen to the admins and other staff, do not argue with them. If you have an issue with a staffer please Petition for Help so another Staffer can handle/look into it. If instead you decide to lash out at them, argue with them in chat or disregard their authority, you will be punished.

These rules are made so everyone can enjoy their time here on HL. Please abide by them so all players can have fun.

You may experience a short outage sometime in the next week as the server is upgraded with a new SATA Raptor Hard Drive. Hopefully, this will help speed up the site as well as prevent further crashes. Thanks again for your continued patience and support. I know how hard these errors have been for all of us.

Happy Holidays!

I'll be upgrading HL very soon (i.e. tonight or tomorrow). There will be some small bugs you will have to worry about like PHP warnings after defeating monsters while traveling; the live chat will be temporarily down; and you won't be able to display your weapons and armor via your prefs option. This upgrade should hopefully help with the crashes and the overall speed of HL.

As for the site being down you have Edmund to thank for getting it back up today. Thank you all for your continued patience and support as we try to work everything out.

EDIT: When the site is down try going to the Hogwarts Live Forums to see if anything has been posted there.

EDIT: Because the site is running a lot faster at the moment I think I might hold off on the upgrade till some more of the kinks are worked out of it.

Ok, sorry about the few hours of downtime today, you probably won't believe it, but it wasn't a database problem this time.

The server upgraded itself last night and for some reason when the normal cleanup scripts were run, php broke on re-entry!

The site is up now, and I've launched a Hill of Beans raffle!

Winner take all candy raffle, one bean per ticket, winner gets all of the beans entered in the raffle! Why would you want to win a hill of beans?

Well why not?!

Winner to be announced in the Candy Raffle shop at Midnight Christmas Eve night/Christmas Morning!