Difference between revisions of "Server zeroing"

Revision as of 19:36, 3 September 2005

Server Zeroing is a technical fault that occurs from time to time.

Introduction

You log in and find that suddenly your nation has become the 0 of 0. Your caption is a zero-length string ("") and your pristine customised flag has become a red-cross or replaced with the alt text. All of your telegrams are missing, and all of your Civil Rights, Economy and Political Freedoms ratings are reset to "Good".

Your issues have disappeared, your region has become 0, and there's no regional messages or other NS nations in it. It claims the nation's last activity was 13,021 days ago (which was on January 1, 1970). The regional description has disappears and it is described as "devoid of nations".

Everything appears to have been lost. You log out to log in again to see if things are back to normal, but it claims your password is incorrect.

What has happened?

The server has had a technical hitch and thus cannot present your data on screen. This is why everything appears as zeros, blanks or zero-length strings - these are the default field values in the database for unmodified fields. This is why this is called "Server Zeroing".

Your nation has NOT been deleted! It's just default behaviour for the game engine to prevent hideously offputting error messages being displayed to people because error messages can make people feel that something is wrong with their machine. Your computer is NOT at fault! The only problem is that due to the updating system the changes in the last day or so will have been lost but this is not a problem, as the administrative and moderation team are logically minded and so have backups of all nations.

So what happens now?

• The moderators will discover the situation and mend the technical issues first. Finding the fault may take some time, so please be patient.
• Some testing will be involved to ensure that all pending errors are fixed in the game engine.
• The most recent backup prior to the error will be used to restore the database. This will mean that you lose the most recent changes you made, but you will still have the issues present to make the same decision again, or treat this as a golden opportunity to change your mind that you normally wouldn't get.
• The system should be back to normal after these steps and your nation should be suitable for logging in again, passwords and data restored.