The site has handled the Keelhauliday rush well, and we're so happy to see you all!

One of the big draws this time of year is the Ocean Depths vending machine, since its rarity cap is different and it gives out items from Freyalise as part of its pool while the shop is open. (Something to keep in mind if you have those stockpiled wizard tokens. ^_~ )

But when you go to a page like the vending machine where it's modifying your inventory, it counts all of the items in your inventory to check against inventory limit. Which it does by looking at ALL inventory items in all accounts, figuring out which ones belong to you, and creating a count of that. If you add/remove any items, that cached token is removed, and it does the query again. It's intensive even during normal site traffic, but works overtime during holidays. As just mentioned Subeta's coding does has a caching system to manage the queries, but the more people online the faster the cache expires and the 504s start creeping in.

One of the ways we can reduce this load is by managing items in the inventories of people who haven't logged on for a while; their inventory items still get counted and it's a constant bottleneck we're going to keep running into especially during busier times of the year. So starting soon, if you have not logged on in six months, items in your inventory will be automatically moved to your vault.

Keith is going to add a message to the inventory page that will show up for anyone whose items got moved, but we also wanted to get the word out to people otherwise and have this in Announcements for future reference.

Thank you for reading! May the Omen Islands waters be warm for you (or cool, depending on your preferences) and don't forget to put ideas you really want to see for upcoming festivities in the Suggestions thread!

Yeah, there are ways to do it and Keith is working on streamlining, but Subeta has eighteen years' worth of various processes and features that in some cases need to be completely rewritten for something new, or need to maintain continuity of experience or functionality which makes changes tricky. Some automated tools like this should help in the meantime, though!

That would help, if you can get to it! We just do understand sometimes it's not practical for people to sort often or get distracted by life before they can get to it, so hope that this will be a good compromise. My personal system uses the shop filtering a lot: I put everything into one shop and then use the rarity sort at the top and options at the bottom to move to my non-rare shop, or gallery, or vault, or back to inventory as needed from there..

Speak of them and they shall appear, it looks like, but Keith set up a second large web server that seems to have done the trick.

Item ideas for our upcoming holidays would be great! If you have ideas from your local Ren Faire, for instance, those can be used for Fireside.

Hmm, maybe? If you can put that in the P&B forum for separate follow-up, though, just in case it's something else, I'd appreciate. Screenshots would also be welcome!

All right, the /news.php appending to random stuff should be fixed, it may be a few minutes while the rules propagate through all the caching. It was basically a setting on the new server being spun up that needed to be fixed. Thank you all for your patience! As you can tell, there are a lot of spinning plates and we appreciate you sticking with us. ^_^;;

I'm locking replies to this topic for now since the main information has been outlined, I'll post more as it happens on the subject. Thanks, everyone!