The Recycle beast is requesting new items!

Congratulations to pokemonxdofdarknes for winning a Graveyard Potion in the Potion Lottery!

Item Names & Descriptions

Effectively immediately, the following standards are in place for all item names and descriptions.

Artists, please double-check your work when uploading images.
Item Administrators, please do not rely on the artists to get it right. Review item descriptions and names for proper grammar, spelling, and make any changes you deem necessary. Checking image names is also a good idea.

[li]Use proper capitalization. Capitalize every word in item names. The only exceptions should be for articles or prepositions in book titles, e.g., Cleaning the Shell or The Big Book of Felis. [li]American spelling only. This isn't to discriminate; we really do need to be consistent and since the Subetapedia has to abide by these standards, it makes sense that our items and descriptions should too. [li]Check your compound/hyphenated words. Please don't assume that two words can be put together as a compound or a hyphenated word without double-checking first. Unless you're able to use creative license with a brand name, e.g., RebelTranquility or Rainyday, look up the proper context and use it instead. [li]Avoid apostrophes, ampersands, plus signs, quotation marks and most other symbols. These end up creating multiple slashes every time the item is edited, making our items and descriptions look sloppy. Try using ''Item of '' instead of '''s item''. Likewise, do not give your item any name that requires an apostrophe or comma. Omitting these necessary symbols does not look any better than the slashes. [li]Item names should be at least four characters long. Users cannot search without at least four characters in the item name. [li]Do not use numbers in item titles. Spell it out or use Roman numerals instead. [li]Do not begin item titles with articles. This not only makes our events on site look sloppy, e.g., ''You have found a The Chrust!'' or ''The Wizard has just given you a A Sai!'' but it also just sounds plain odd. Books are exempt from this rule. [li]Do not put articles in minion names. Names like ''Darko the Ninja,'' ''Bobo the Balancer,'' ''Kelly the Guide Dog,'' and ''Pe-Nut the Disturbingly Happy Minion'' look incredibly awkward when given to a pet and named. See Cannibal and her minion. Keep in mind when drawing minions that you are not creating one unique character. You are creating an entire species that people will want to give their own unique names and personalities, much like pets.

These standards are repeated on this thread for future reference.

News Posts

In the same line of thought, all news posters should be double-checking their posts for proper spelling, grammar and punctuation. The news is one of the first things people see when they come to Subeta. While it seems like such a small issue, in reality it affects our professional image. If we want people to be impressed with this site, we need to take some pride in it and start worrying about these little things. Put simply, we need to be impressive.

Grammar is not everyone's forte, so if you're unsure of something, run it past someone who is strong with grammar. It's also a good idea to get into the habit of writing out news posts in a word processing program with a spelling and grammar checker like MS Word or OpenOffice Writer.

If we all make a concerted effort, we and the users will see fewer of these errors. It can only have a positive effect on our reputation. :)

Thank you.

The Recycle beast is requesting new items!

Congratulations to MissMay for winning a Bloodred Potion in the Potion Lottery!

Hi everyone. Unfortunately, as many of you noticed we had 2 moderate (more than 15 minutes) periods of downtime today, one this morning and one this evening. I wanted to let you guys know what happened, and what needs to happen as a result. :)

This morning, our database server locked up (which happens to us occasionally, you could call it "growing pains.") This morning's lockup was particularly bad as all 3 web servers became overloaded with people trying to load the site, and so slow that it took forever for me to log into any of them (for example, to take the site down and stop people from hammering the web servers xD)

To further complicate matters, the database became corrupted as a result of the lockup, and refused to start. At that point we switched to our backup database, which is synchronized with the main one, and brought the site back up.

The downtime this evening was the result of db2 locking up, which was corrected with a restart of the database.

This left our primary database server offline though, so Subeta will be taken down over Monday/Tuesday (Tuesday morning) at 3 am in order to synchronize the two and return to operating on db1.

In case you're curious why the database locks up like this: Subeta uses caching to save the answers to frequently asked questions that would otherwise be asked of the database (for example: "give me a random avatar to show on the homepage?"). The cache expires after a certain time, however, and if there's lots of users on the site, hundreds of users suddenly ask the database the same question. You'd think this wouldn't cause a problem, but the database really doesn't know that lots of people are asking the same thing, so it dutifully tries and answer the same question hundreds of times. Meanwhile, all the normal Subeta queries get backed up while 200 database threads compete over access to the same information, and eventually it gets so bogged down that it only answers 100 or so questions/second, as opposed to the 5,000 we normally run.

There are ways around this, of course, and we've been implementing them whenever we come across this problem. For the moment, though, whenever we fix one of these problems (like the random HA on the home page), another one steps up to take its place. Rest assured that each time this happens, progress is being made!

Anyway, in summary, site will be down Tuesday at 3am - 4:30am to resync the database servers.

-Alex

The Recycle beast is requesting new items!

Congratulations to Kysta for winning a Sun Potion in the Potion Lottery!

<center><img src=http://images.subeta.net/items/toy_cuddlyarcticbuddy.gif><img src=http://images.subeta.net/items/wrappedgift_blueminigiftbox.gif><img src=http://images.subeta.net/items/minion_snowfairy_red.gif></center><br /><Br />The new achievement system has arrived! You can find your achievements <a href=/achievements.php>here</a>. There is a new <a href=/profile.php?act=edit>Profile</a> section for them, so you can look at your friends' achievements and <a href=/achieve/Keith>compare</a>!<br /><br />If you have collected achievements previously, you can go <a href=/preferences.php?act=achievements>here</a> to collect your legacy avatars. Legacy is the name for the old avatars that will no longer be given out, so make sure to pick yours up! ;) <br /><Br /><i>Note</i>: If you are confused about ones like the forums, etc. You do not have to "redo" them, just visit the <a href=/forums/index.php>forums</a> (etc) to get them. :) Things like the reading contest and the restock war you won't be able to get right away, and will have to wait for these events to happen again. ;)

Those of you using Internet Explorer should download <a href=http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-078.mspx>this</a> patch as soon as possible. :)

The Recycle beast is requesting new items!

Congratulations to xsunnyx for winning a Twilight Potion in the Potion Lottery!

<center><img src=http://images.subeta.net/achievements/royalty.gif> <img src=http://images.subeta.net/achievements/millionaire.gif> <img src=http://images.subeta.net/achievements/pho.gif></center>

Change is in the air. Those of you who are working toward achievements might want to hurry. ;)

You can find more information here. :)

The Gatekeeper has finally decided to give those venturing to the Blackheart Hollow the opportunity to nab one of his favorite weapons of all! :D

<center> <br /><img src=/images/mct_popstar_preview.png> <img src=/images/mct_boyband_preview.png></center><br /><h1>OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN.</h1>Ready to pull the heartstrings of young girls all over the country, or strap on your headset mic and sing about how lucky you are? Maybe you're a member of a boy band, traveling the country womanizing. <br />If so, the Popstar Costume Trunk in the <a href=/cashshop.php?act=items>Cash Shop</a> is just what you need to get started on your own toxic world tour! ;!<br />(Note: The female and male trunk have approximately thirteen items each. Not all items are shown in these previews.)

The Recycle beast is requesting new items!

Congratulations to Brenni for winning a Nuclear Potion in the Potion Lottery!

<center> </center> <br /><br /> Attention Internet Explorer Users! There is a <u>serious flaw</u> in all modern versions of Internet Explorer, which opens up the chance of your personal information being stolen. <br /><br /> This is not an error with Subeta, or any website. This is a problem with the programming itself that allows malicious code to take advantage of your computer, and install malicious software, that could steal the information that you use for your banking, paypal, or other highly personal information. <br /><br /> You can find information about this <a href=http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gGrwHSPBoys1ouBd7lHjbMs9dgUgD953Q2800>here</a>, <a href=http://www.techflash.com/IE_flaw_prompts_advice_to_switch36236209.html>here</a> and <a href=http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Internet+Explorer&btnG=Search+News>here is a link to google news, with Internet Explorer as the keyword</a> so you can get up to date news on the bug itself. <br /><br /> Also, I want to tell you that having a firewall does not prevent this from affecting you. Most virus scanners (unless this is used to maliciously place a known keylogger on your system) will not be able to help you in this situation. The best way to fix this problem is to get rid of the software that is causing it. <br /><br /> Now, I'm not asking you to switch to another browser. I highly advise that you move to another browser, not only because this is a very critical problem, but because the other browsers are just better. They use less memory, they are less bloated, and most importantly, if there is a critical flaw, the other major browsers are very quick to issue a patch and correct the problem. We are not being paid by either the Mozilla Foundation, or the Safari Team (or <a href=http://opera.com>Opera</a>, or <a href=http://www.flock.com>flock</a> to ask you to switch browsers. I simply care about you, our users, and don't want to see your private information stolen, or used against you. <br /><br /> The browser I suggest looking into are <a href=http://www.getfirefox.com>Firefox</a> or <a href=http://www.apple.com/safari>Safari</a>. <br /><br /> Doing a little <a href=http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005614>research</a> on all the major browsers is probably in your best interest.