I purged about 150,000 user accounts that had no data associated with them. Botters had created 95% of these accounts and I could tell the number of user accounts was one of the major reasons the server has been having issues the past few months. I also turned on user account creation again, but added a security question which I hope will circumvent the botters from creating more useless accounts. I banned as many ip addresses as I could associate with these botters and will continue to follow up. I added some new firewall rules to better protect the server as well.

I spent some time tweaking the web server and mysql settings. With these tweaks as well as the user account cleanup, the site seems to be running much better overall for now. I have a script to monitor the swap space usage and restart web services when it starts swapping. The hosting company had been recently shutting down this server because it was swapping too much memory to disk. I hope this will stop them from shutting down the site again until I can find some better web server and mysql settings. If you see the bad gateway error, the web services and restarting and should be up within 30 seconds.

I also created some new indexes in the database to speed up some of the queries. It seems noticeably faster now.

There are no plans to shut down the site as of yet, but I did recently have to downgrade the server again because I was paying too much out of my own pocket. 1GB of RAM is all we have now on this virtual slice and it's not really enough to handle the amount of users on this site very well.

I doubled the speed and the memory of the server for a little more monthly cost. Hopefully the speed increase will help the server pay for itself.

We've decided to create some forum rules for our every growing community.

http://wlodb.com/topics/6051

I hope everyone will do their best to follow these rules and keep wlodb.com a fun and safe place to come and and get answers to all your Wonderland Online needs.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the new forum rules please feel free to private message me by going here: http://wlodb.com/pms and selecting 'New Private Message' and finding my name in the drop down menu.

Thanks everyone ^_^

Huge thanks to Sarin for adding almost all of the v6 items and manufactures. I know she spent at least a few days entering all the information in the site. Not to mention she has been doing a great moderating the forums. She has been working hard to make sure everyone here has the latest information.

Make sure to say hi if you see her around in chat or on the forums and don't forget to thank her!

I want to say thanks to everyone else who has been contributing to the site so far. These past couple days the site has had doubled the amount of traffic it has ever had in a single day in the past.

Also, I posted another news article earlier today about updating the manufactures view. Check it out if you haven't see it yet!

I added the required items in the main manufacture view so you no longer have to click on the item to get the information. I also upped the cap that was set so items that take longer than 60 minutes to make or require more than 50 of one material will show up properly.

Check it out:

http://wlodb.com/manufactures?direction=DESC&am...

Finally added a catchable field to the monsters. Sarin is going to help update the fields as I set them all the unknown by default. Feel free to open a thread if you want to start a list to help the admins update this data.

Also, I made some CSS fixes so the borders on the rest of the tables should show up properly when using browsers like Chrome. Let me know if any of them look a little weird now.

I know everyone has been asking for some smilies for a while. I updated the bbcode tags to handle a few. I'm still working on making icons on the page so you can just click them.

I posted bbcode info with smilies at http://wlodb.com/help

Here are some examples:

I'll look through the smiley thread we have going and update them with some nicer ones soon.

Thanks to everyone on the site for their continued support. I know it's been a while since I have been around and want to give a huge thanks to SeaWolf for stepping up to help administer the site.

With everyone's help I think the majority of version 5 items have been added to the database. Huge thanks again goes to SeaWolf for adding the new manufactures and most of the images you guys uploaded to the site.

I swear I'm going to see if I can get around to making some site updates soon enough!

Huge thanks to keyoshikira for adding all those new items to the site. I went through and updated the images. I also added all the new manufactures that I noticed. Let me know if you see anything I missed!

As always, if you have any missing images from http://wlodb.com/items/missing_images please post them here or in the missing images thread here http://wlodb.com/topics/74 and I will update them.

Sorry it's been so long since the last update. I've been working on improving the site's performance lately since I noticed it's been getting bogged down when there are more than 30 users online at a time...and I have a better idea of how to code some of the stuff now that I've had some more experience.

I ended up rewriting the items, compounds, and recycles section which improved performance a lot! The items and recycles page loads a couple seconds faster and the compounds page should pull up at least two or three times as fast now (about 2-3 seconds instead of 5-6 seconds).

I also added a fake items search filter for compounds/items and an alchemy type for compounds as well.

Another change I made which will help the server load is that the filters for the compound now only apply to the compound result and not the compound components EXCEPT for the name search (unless you check only apply name filter to compound result). I ended up doing the same thing with recycles. I think most of them probably didn't really make sense to apply these filters to all the items in the compounds or recycles anyway.

The filter changes should definitely save lots more memory on the server since they were using up lots of database resources.

Let me know if you can see the difference!