The Development Team section of the site is now up and running, albeit in a very temporary state.  The Development Team name will be announced alongside the merger with another major Trade Wars website, at which time the development team will take over that site’s domain name and have its own dedicated website.

I’m going to work some on getting this front page cleaned up tonight, and will probably create a timeline of the “Slashdot Effect” just as a memoir of perhaps the single busiest day a TWGS server has ever endured.  Want to talk about a stress test?   The server has accepted over 4,000 connections since the Slashdot post.  In the past two days DagBot has cleared out a countless number of player records under accounts that were only used once, as well as a huge amount of duplicate accounts.   Still, dozens of players have continued to return to play their daily turns, and in many cases, in several different games.  The server itself seemed to run smoothly despite the online chaos the day of the post.  Unfortunately the past three days have seen a dramatic increase in mail file corruption, and today, sector data in game b became corrupted, which resulted in several players being kicked out of the game after entering the offending sector, and admins being kicked from TEDIT when trying to access the sector record to move players to safety before “blackholing” the sector.  I later repaired the damaged sector manually, and the game is back on track.

— Icehawk

Slashdot Updtate: This will be the final update regarding the OLGN.COM TWGS server having been “Slashdotted.”  At 5:30 EST sharp, Kitty’s Playground received it’s 7,000th hit!  Yes, in the course of a week, Kitty’s Playground has had well over 2,000 hits, the peak traffic coming on Feb 23 with 892 hits.   Thanks to c843247-a.rchdsn1.tx.home.com for being the 7,000th hit to Kitty’s Playground!  Preliminary indications are that the OLGN.COM TWGS server has picked up perhaps 50 to 75 new users in the course of two days, and we’re currently working very hard with all these new players (and former players as well) to make their Trade Wars experience as fun as possible.

Slashdot Update: The heaviest portion of the Slashdot “attack” seemed to have ended this morning.  Around 7 am we were averaging a minimum of ten users online at any given time.  By early afternoon that had steadily climbed into the low twenties before dropping back down to the high teens where it is as of this post at 2:32 EST.  Thanks to jc-235197.oz-online.net who was our 6,000th hit to Kitty’s Playground at 5:57 am February 23rd.  Since then, we’ve already received an additional 350 hits.  With luck, we will surpass the 7,000 mark by this evening for a net gain of 2,000 hits in two days time!  We expect another surge of players to arrive later tonight as the “news” that Trade Wars is still alive and kicking is spread even further yet!

Slashdot Update: People are still trickling in from the Slashdot post, which last time was checked was still on the main page.  It appears that overnight we had a average of ten users playing at any given time and another 200 total connections since I turned in for the night at 3 am.  We’ve gotten an excellent response from new players–many are showing a definite interest in learning the game, a belief backed up by the incredible number of hits Kitty’s Playground has received to the Library section, in particular the Trade Wars Instructions.  Over 6,000 hits now for the site, an increase of 1,000 in only a day and a half!  We’ve also found a lot of former players who thought Trade Wars was dead, never to return again.  “I miss sitting in front of a computer for hours playing Trade Wars,” one former player commented after joining a game.

We’ll keep the site updated as best as possible with the latest news in our efforts to bring in both new players and former players.  For now, its off to Observer mode I go to help our guests get acquainted with the game!

Wow!  That’s all I can say!  Last night at 6:10 pm the olgn.com server was Slashdotted!  Now mind you, Slashdot gets about 15 million hits a day, and sends out even more news-based email.  I wasn’t even aware of the posting until I watched as the server suddenly had not one, not two, not even three, but ten connections open up almost simultaneously.  Within minutes, we were up to 20 connections, then thirty.  They connected and disconnected.  More connected, checked out the games and disconnected.  And on and on it went.  Around 8:00 pm the effect was overwhelming.  93 simultaneous connections!  Granted, those 93 didn’t last all but a couple minutes, and by 9:30 it had dropped back down to a very moderate 30 players.  By 1 am, it was down to around a dozen.  Throughout the night we recruited temporary assistant server admins to stay in games and answer questions, as a majority of the players we received had never played before.  I spoke with one player who played TW200 (that’s Gary’s 200 sector game) something like 12 years ago.  He thought TW was dead.  He’ll be back.  Similar stories were told in almost all the games!

The net effect?  Max simultaneous connections: 93.  Total connections between 6 pm and 11 pm: 677.  Web traffic: Approximately 983 hits occured after 6 pm and between 11 pm.

Now we sit and wait and see what response we get from the IRC bots that broadcast Slashdot articles and from the email.

Special Announcement: Has Kitty’s Playground hit the big time?   Naww, but as of 10:43 EST we received our  5,000th hit!  Ever since I first posted the site to Tripod, then on Intergate, and finally to its permanent home here on my home network, I’ve been amazed at the number of people that have visited my little upstart web site.  Thanks to gateway.sask.trlabs.ca for being the five thousandth visitor to Kitty’s Playground!  This only reinforces my desire to continue expanding and push Icehawk harder in the planned rollout of several new and exciting services that no other site currently has!  This and more coming soon!

Yes, I have responded to Gypsy’s Yahoogroups post, and I’ve responded in a much more appropriate place–here!  I was very disheartened by the fact that he would choose to make a post like that in Yahoogroups.  While I ask for criticism, that severe of criticism should be left to private e-mail where it doesn’t have any possibility of creating a free-for-all in a public forum.

So for those of you who want to do some more serious reading, here’s the link to my reply to Gypsy.

Check out Timberwolf’s response to my interview with Aitvo here…

Also check out Silver Wings’ response to the interview here…

The interview seemed to generate a fairly decent response… the second highest ever number of hits in one day.  Considering the interview didn’t go live on the site until around 5:30 makes this the single best hits per hour that the site has ever had.   To everyone who stopped in, and especially to everyone who took the time to read the interview in its entirity, thank you!

If you have any comments about the interview, please feel free to send me an email or an ICQ.  Be it compliment or criticism, every email or message I receive will be answered.  Can’t promise I’ll get back to you in the next two or three hours, as I’m about to take my nap like I do every 20 hours or so, but I will answer every mail or message in due time.