Temporary Maintenance Alert

[Tom]

This is just a quick announcement to inform all users of The Elder Stats that maintenance will be carried out on the website for the next couple of days. During this time, some areas or functions of the website may be malfunctioning. One obvious side-effect of this maintenance will be that some times on the website will appear as timestamps, which look like a bunch of numbers instead of a full date. So, you may be seeing things like this around the website for the next couple of days:

1256773200

Don't worry - this is expected during this maintenance period. Please refrain from reporting any bugs you may find with the website until we have officially announced that this maintenance period has been completed.

Thank you, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

[Tom]

The maintenance which has taken place over the past couple of days has now been completed. Everything on The Elder Stats should now be back in working order again, possibly working even better than it did before. I've fixed a few bugs during this maintenance, specifically these:

• The "Latest Updated Characters" section on the Home page finally displays the latest updated characters in the correct order.
• The "Previous" link on the character leaderboards no longer runs into the "Key" on each page.
• The "Previous" link on the character search results no longer runs into the text that displays the number of results found.

A few other minor bugs have been fixed, but I thought these were some of the most noticeable bug fixes (especially that first one).

The main focus with this maintenance period was to change the way dates were stored in the database on The Elder Stats. Previously, dates were stored as plain text which set many limitations for how we could manipulate the displaying of dates all over the website. I worked on converting all of the plain text dates in the database to Unix timestamps, which is the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970. It certainly took a while to convert the dates in the database and make the website work with these timestamps instead of the plain text dates, but that task has now been completed. This is the reason why the "Latest Updated Characters" section on the Home page never showed the correct latest updated characters, but this is all fixed now.

One more small thing you may notice across the website is that, if the date on something is today's date or yesterday's date, it will say Today, X:00 am or Yesterday, X:00 pm instead of just showing the exact date. I feel that this is a nice change, and it allows the website to seem more "interactive", or at least more geared towards higher activity.

So, the maintenance is now completed and everything has returned to normal. If you find any bugs around the website, please post a topic in the Bug Reports forum about the bugs you find. We appreciate your help.