Hogwarts Live Blog

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!

-says, "I'm removing less important modules until after the upgrade is done"
- :says, "Several of the secondary cities have been removed"
- :says, "As have a few of the simple stat bar things like display of charm and new day guages"
- :says, "New Days themselves are not gone, just the bar that displays when the next one is"


Everything will come back after Danilo has done the upgrade to the new version. Things from the missing villages have been put into the remaining villages so please just explore the site.

The site experienced another crash yesterday. The accounts table was completely lost but Edmund was able to restore from the previous night's back-ups so all basic stats are from then. This is why you may be a lower level then what you were before logging out last, or your weapon/armor may not be the same or gold balance may be different, etc. Although the data was lost from a period of less than 24 hours, it WAS restored to previous stats so nothing was lost except time.

The Music Shop that was in Hogsmeade has been removed as it was causing problems. At this point, we do not know if it will be brought back.

We are less than a month away from the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DVD and HogwartsLive, Wizards.FM, and Wizards.Pro are giving away a copy of the two disk special edition. The Candy Raffle is open in Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, come trade in your Bertie Botts beans for raffle tickets to win!

Again, sorry for the problems. I temporarily fixed the issue that Witchy mentioned, until Edmund has time to look into this, I'll try to make sure the site gets recovered faster if it goes down again. I'm currently under a lot of pressure from school, with midterms this week for my on-campus classes, and a final for one of my online classes nearing. I've just been swamped with project after project. Please be patient, we will trying something out in the coming weeks that should fix the any issues regarding crashing, though it could be pricey so first we'll have to explore whether or not it's a viable option for HL.

The site is still experiencing problems. We are aware of it and are trying to correct them. While most people can log into the site, once they are in, they get a call stack error and are stuck. Petitioning to fix navs will not work as Staff is stuck too (and the fact that its not a navs issue anyway). All the names you see in the Online List are people who have tried and failed to get onto the site...myself included. Please bear with us while we try to sort out the problems. Edmund and Danilo are doing all they can to get the site back up and running properly.

Thanks :)

ADDED:You may also visit http://harrypotter.wizards.pro and check the forums there or just poke around that site. We are trying to keep that updated as well.