The Free Shop is a finicky thing.

How it works: I add in a bunch of items from various places to this one pool of items, generally in the thousands. The shop pulls from that to stock. During peak hours, when there are a lot of users online, the shop sells out quickly because everyone is grabbing something and even if things don't sell out right when it restocks it likely will once everyone's timer ends. During the dead hours like now, unfortunately, the shop doesn't have enough users grabbing things with the timer. This is when I manually have to clear the shop's stock you see when you go to click a box; so if you saw the shop with LOTS of boxes and then all the sudden nothing but it's been like 10 minutes and not many on, it was likely me.

Because I'm human and need sleep, I've cleared the pool the shop is pulling from so for the next few hours nothing will restock until I can get or to see why it's not automatically clearing out the extras in the shop when it hits a certain threshold like I technically shouldn't have to clear it manually but because it's not working correctly at the moment, it lags the site/freezes the shop. I thought we fixed this last year and everything looked fine during my quick glance at the code before opening the shop yesterday.

I'll do a news post later basically describing this again once a programmer has had the chance to fix it to work correctly!

This is only for today! I've ping'd Keith and Bug in our staff channels to work on this asap in the morning; once I get up in a few hours I'll start restocking the shop again. It's not going to be like this every night, I refuse. It should be clearing out an extra items over x amount automatically, but it's not for some reason, which is why I've had to manually clear it a few times so the site doesn't explode.

good idea!

I've added a note to the shop, thanks to the suggestion from , and a clever SB user suggested putting it in one of the scode boxes to draw attention. You should see this message now:

[box=#eeffee]Note: Due to a programming issue, the shop is not clearing out automatically after a certain amount of items restock, so to keep the site online without errors/lag, the pool of items the shop pulls from has been cleared until 10am EST (so Amber can sleep a bit). The programming issue will be looked into and hopefully we won't have another night of no items restocking or the site going down![/box]

And now I'm going to sleep for a few hours! <3

It ran out of items for a few restocks. It is stocking again.