Content Syndicated by GuildPortal.com (c)2001-2013 Axiom Shift, LLC

Service Outage

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:14:05 GMT

From 1/1/2013 to 1/3/2013 at 10:14 AM (Mountain), GuildPortal services went offline. Here's what went down, in sequence. The cause of the problem had its start on 12/16/2012, so I'll begin there:

12/16/2012 to 12/31/2013: The server backups, which are stored on a network share, failed to execute for two weeks straight. In the case of backup failures, our server provider's management tools are supposed to alert them so that whatever the problem is can be fixed. That didn't happen. So for two weeks, GuildPortal was flying without a backup, and nobody knew.

1/1/2013: The drive on the database server that stores the full-text index, fails, and the site goes down. When there is a drive/controller failure, our server provider's system (again) is supposed to alert them. The first tech I spoke with later acknowledged this, but said that they weren't using their old notification system anymore, since the company that acquired them was going to have them use their newer system. What happens in between? No notifications or alerts of any kind.

1/1/2013, 1:30 PM: Sandy finds out the site's been down all night when she does her usual check to make sure things are running. I get on the phone with our server provider while she lets everyone know that we're on it on our Facebook page. I am connected to someone in technical support who is genuinely helpful, but who has very little SQL knowledge.

I put up an "offline" page on the GuildPortal site, informing everyone that we'll be back, and providing a link to our Facebook page where we begin posting updates as we have them, and answering questions.

Over the next 7 hours, the tech repeatedly attempts to get ahold of a DBA to help with the problem. We both breathe a little easier when we get a response back in the form of an IM from the regular DBA from home. A few IMs later, we have something to try, and the tech and I give it a go, brimming with optimism. I post on Facebook that everything should be up and running within 30+ minutes.

1/1/2013, 9:30 PM: It's taking far too long. I suspect something is wrong, so I cancel the operation. It takes 4 hours to cancel, even though it was only initially running for 1. The culprit, it turns out, was the database file itself. When the N drive failed, it left the primary database file and the associated log file in a totally unstable (and it now appears, unrecoverable) state. The DBA we were IMing is now incommunicado.

No problem, we thought, because I'd been paying for the extended SQL support package faithfully for all these years. That means he can hop on the phone and get the revered On-Call SQL Team to fly in on an epic mount, day or night. While we wait for them to respond to his initial pages and phone calls and IMs, we try a couple different restore strategies. At the time we didn't know the state of the main database file, so again, we were optimistic.

I again, stupidly, post an update on Facebook saying that our latest attempt resulted in a success and that the site would be up any moment. I end up staring at a spinning ball with the words "query executing" next to it for the next several hours.

1/2/2013, 2:03 AM: The restore failed. All phone calls, pages, and IMs to the On-Call SQL Team have been totally ignored. The tech is frustrated, apologetic, and (if I read it right) a little embarrassed for his company. I post apologies and stop giving ETAs on Facebook, but continue communicating with everyone, not wanting you guys to think I'd snuggled up to a pillow and said "heck with them."

It's now 13 hours after the initial phone call, and the odds of us getting a DBA involved at all before the regular morning shift are looking slimmer with every passing minute. Dread sinks in (forgive the melodrama).

The tech and I part on the phone, since he can only really sit there and listen to me breathe while I try different ways to restore the database. Attaching, single-file attaching, standard restore, restore with full-text indexing belayed, different recovery models, etc.. After we hang up, he continues to attempt to get ahold of the On-Call SQL Team until his shift ends, to no avail. My efforts, of course, were equally doomed.

1/2/2013, 5:08 AM: I've tried everything I could think of. At this point, I post updates on Facebook and wait for a herd of DBAs to show up all bright-eyed for work at our server management company's HQ (they're two hours ahead of me).

1/2/2013, 9:09 AM: I'm informed that a DBA is working to get the server fixed. I remain cheerful and optimistic, since now we at least had a DBA on the case, and (I thought) I'd be able to give you guys a reasonably accurate ETA before too long. I post to Facebook, with a smiley face even.

I thank the DBA very much for taking it on and ask very politely and delicately (I'm careful around DBAs) if, at any time he has even the smallest update that I could give you guys, that he just shoot a real quick e-mail my way. KK? Tks u!

I head back to Facebook, posting and chatting it up to let you all know I'm staying with it until it's fixed, and also because it helps me stay awake. We all wait for the DBA to work his magic, and send us little updates that I can relay to you.

1/2/2013, 1:50 PM: The DBA comes back after some attempts with bad news. The database file is corrupt. But he has a plan that he has used before, and he is confident it will work. I post his e-mail, verbatim, on Facebook. Hope glimmers once more. Like anime eyes.

To pass the time while this plan is set in motion, I post some polls to Facebook. We all again wait, collectively, for the Awesomeness to happen. One of my guild leaders posts that he's a DBA too, and gives me a tip to pass along to Johnny that might save a lot of time.

So I call up and ask to speak with our server management company's DBA, thinking he'd appreciate the tip. Well, as soon as the guy who answered the phone IMed him that I had some info that might "help" him, he wouldn't take my call. Busy guy, I guess! Must have already thought of it anyway, right? No hard feelings...

1/2/2013, 4:02 PM: After waiting for around two hours with no update, and my guild leaders becoming understandably more anxious, I lose my patience, Samuel L. Jackson style. In a totally unreasonable rage, I write the following, unthinkably terrible thing to the DBA. The following is the actual body of the e-mail I sent. Parents, you might want to send your children out of the room. Here it is:

"Hiya Johnny! How's it going? Look like it's going to work?"

1/2/2013, 5:32 PM: The DBA replies with open hostility, accusing my "team" (I have a team?!) of detaching the database in a way that corrupted it, when in fact the loss of the N drive finished it off long before, and the failure of the entire alerting process all the way back from the backups that had failed weeks before to this point was the real villian of the story. None of which I had control over.

He closes by inviting me and my "team" to do it ourselves if we think we can do better.

At that point, I swear, the world turned upside down. It wasn't a proud moment for me, but I clicked on the reply button and type up an e-mail that conveyed some of the anger that had been building up, but more of the hurt and disbelief at what was going on.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, immediately after reading this e-mail, the DBA stopped any running restore, disconnected from his session, and walked away. I wouldn't hear anything from our hardware service provider until the following morning. The worst part is that he full well knew he wasn't just punishing me, but all of you, as well.

After I posted what had happened to Facebook, many, many guild leaders (you guys, yay!) basically raided the hardware service provider's Facebook page. Immediately upon seeing it (once they got in), they responded, saying they'd make fixing it a "top priority." While I wasn't contacted until a couple hours after that, I am sure that you guys proving you were real, and not to be trifled with, had everything to do with the fact that we would get some real results, and soon.

To my horror, the best that could be done was a restore from the last backup that had succeeded, on 12/16/2012. So any new data from then until the site went back online would be lost. Though catastrophic and totally unacceptable in my (and I'm sure, your) eyes, I had to give the go-ahead. There was just no other option, at least, none that they could or would provide.

1/3/2013, 10:14 AM: The site comes back online, with data restored from 12/16/2012.

This will not happen again.

For my part, even if we're paying our provider extra for support packages that include monitoring, alerts, and reliable backups, I will not take it for granted that anything, whether it's something I have control over or not, is working as it should be. I will check on backups and perform many of the other IT-type tasks that we have been relying on someone else to handle.

I'll invest (as soon as I can -- this event has cost us dearly, financially, and GuildPortal is already "in the red" because of the economy and lack of new games that really draw new players into the MMO world) in more hardware that will add more layers of fault tolerance to all tiers of the GuildPortal service.

Sandy has been diligently refunding all subscriptions for all new sites created after 12/16/2012 (since they're not there any more). She is nearly done as I write this update. If you fall into that category of site, and you haven't seen a refund come through PayPal yet, please give her another day to finish up. You do not need to send in a support ticket. We're not waiting for you to contact us refund you, we are just doing it.

I'm extremely sorry this happened!

This has been, without any question, the worst downtime event in GuildPortal history. It's the worst data loss event for sure (there was only one other -- the result of me writing a bad trigger that deleted a bunch of old shouts it shouldn't have).

It would be tempting to blame our hardware service provider for it all, but deflecting is their game, not mine. The short truth of it is that I should have been double-checking that they were doing their part, whether I was paying more for alerting and reliability services or not. That should have been something I considered part of my job before this all happened, and it most certainly will be, moving forward.

To all of you who lost data, I cannot begin to convey to you how much I feel your rage, anger, disbelief and loss over this. You're not simply punching in letters and numbers to practice your typing, you're building community. To have over two weeks of that just taken away as if it never happened is unacceptable. I was awake from 1/1/2013 at 8:30 AM until the site went back online at 10:14 AM on 1/3/2013, because I wanted to keep providing updates, or at least keep the lines of communication open while we were down... To let you know that your guild is very important to us, whether it's a paid site or not. I didn't choose the guild web hosting vertical niche just because there was nothing else filling it back when we started; I love the idea of providing and enhancing tools for people to build and personalize their communities online, and I just so happen(ed) to be a gamer.

I feel terrible for disappointing you. While the financial hit to us is tremendous, GuildPortal will survive and be here for your guild for years to come. I'm currently looking for another job, as, like I said before, we're in the red, and have been for some time. Once I have one, I'll still be able to provide support and some feature enhancements; I'll just be limited to a couple hours a day or so.

Thank you!

If you are going to leave over this, or have already left, thank you for making your home with us for however long you did. Thank you to all you guild leaders and members who were understanding and supporting on our Facebook page. Thank you to those who are staying, and a promise: it won't happen again.

As always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal!

Wall and More

Aaron Lewis — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 16:38:40 GMT

10/27 Update - Activity Wall

The Activity Wall, a new widget, goes live today! It's like the walls you'll find commonly on social networking sites. It's what the old Status Updates widget was kind of trying to do, only it does it a lot better. It could also be looked at as a replacement for shout boxes altogether, since it supports media.

In order for people to post to it, they'll need to be granted higher than public/applicant access to your site. Here are some of the features:

Posting

The familiar WYSIWYG editor is used, only in a slimmer version. Tools available for now are: toggle full-screen edit mode, spell check, some formatting, insert link, insert image, and insert video (from either YouTube or Vimeo). You may find the area too small to work with, especially if you're inserting big images or videos, so make use of that full-screen toggle on the far left!

Adding Video

Adding video from YouTube or Vimeo is easy. Just go to the web page on YouTube or Vimeo where the video is shown, copy the address, click the blue Play icon to the far right in the wall editor, and paste the URL. Hit your tab key and you'll be presented with a preview of what it'll look like in your post, along with some options.

Most of them can be left alone. The one you want to pay attention to is "Play the video automatically on load." You'll probably want to un-check that box, else risk the wrath of guildies opening the page with the wall on it, getting hit with all kinds of videos starting to play at the same time!

The Next Thing

Once you've added your text/video/images, click the post button and boom -- there you have it. Emoticons are automatically parsed based on defaults and/or any custom emoticons the guild uses. Clicking on the name of the poster displays the standard drop-down menu for doing things like viewing their profile, visiting their blog, chatting with them if they are online, and all that good stuff.

Images

Know how sometimes, you can put an image in a post or a news item and if it's too big, it'll stretch out the page, wrecking the design? Well, I think I've got that figured out now (and with all the layout possibilities there are due to customization, and the fact that IE ignores max-width unless everything's set a particular way at the parent level, it took a while -- that, and I'm dumb as a rock)! Anyway, when you post an image to the wall, it'll now do its best to fit inside the available space, without stretching things out. Notice: if your browser is way, way old, it'll probably be icky like before. So with a large image (the one shown is actually around 1200 pixels wide, in a widget that's about 700 pixels width), here's what a well-behaving browser will show (minus the purple arrows I thought were neat while putting the screens together in Fireworks):

But hey! What if the image is gigantic because there's that much going on? Easy to do with something like an in-game screenshot. And you might want to see it full size. No problem! You can click any images on the wall and they'll open up all sexy like in a gallery-type scroll view dyno-resizing nifty thingy. Stuff. Whatever you wanna call it. Hey, I'm not a writer, k? Anyway, it's got arrows (way better-looking than my purple ones up there) that you can use to move between other images on the wall.

The Morning After (after you post, I mean)

There are a few things at the bottom of each post. People can click on Comments to show comments or add their own. The date and time of the post has been sacrificed in a pagan ritual, making way for the more friendly "how long ago" display. There are tools to delete the post if you're a Super Admin or the original author, and if you're the author you can edit the post, too.

The comments are pretty simple. Not much to explain there. I thought about spinning it so they sounded all complicated and neat and shiny, but... Yeah. No. Oh, and both of those posts are from me. I talk to myself while testing, and for a reason I cannot fathom, I always revert to a despicable sub-set of the English language.

Future Enhancements

Instead of cramming the thing with everything I could think of, taking ideas from some of the major social sites out there, I decided to hold back and push it as it is now. I'm counting on feedback to direct the decision making when it comes to further enhancements for the wall. After all, there are things I found that I like which a lot of you might really not, and there were some features the big boys are sporting now that I really find... icky (who says "icky?" I do!).

So let me know what you would like to see done moving forward. Maybe WYSIWYG editing of comments instead of the simple type-and-hit-enter behavior it has now? Or automatically-entered posts by the site when people apply, add a shout, post something in the forums, add a news item, create a new raid, add an image to the gallery (all linked automatically to the source item)? Anyway, let me know!

Chat Updates

When someone requests a one-on-one chat session, you will now hear a... beeping thingy. Useful if you have more than one browser

Typical GP Chat window open, are looking at a different screen, or have your head spun around facing behind you, like that girl from the Exorcist. I do that sometimes. Don't judge me!

Also, on-demand playable sound effects have been fixed in guild chat. Type /sounds for a clickable list of the currently available ones. In addition, lots of little bugs and stuff were fixed.

Other Stuff

Many widgets have had their displays cleaned up a little. There will be more of this going forward, as we move to a more universally clean (and still customizable) theme format. This is primarily being done to enable us (and you) to create much higher quality themes than is now possible. We will be making use of HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design principles.
Quirky behaviors in some of the style editors have been un-quirkified.
Your hamster has been watching you with malice as you sleep.
The ability to add an image to a post via link instead of the image manager has been restored.
Many other bug fixes.

10/10 Roll-Up

Aaron Lewis — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:59:21 GMT

Many enhancements have been incrementally rolled out since the last release announcement. I'll summarize what's been going on, minus a lot of the minor bug fixes:

New Feature Promotion Letters. Whenever a member is promoted to a higher level, you can replace the default system-sent mail with your own custom one, and you can have a unique letter for every level. For example, you can have a different letter sent when someone is promoted to member versus when someone is promoted to officer or council. Get started with promotion letters in Control Panel > General > Promotion letters or Guild Bar Admin > Member Management > Promotion Letters.
Enhancement New World of Warcraft roster with in-game WoW Guild Achievements. Configuration-free, fast sorting and filtering, more frequently updated, real thumbnails of your characters.. Stay tuned, more new stuff for WoW is on the way.
Enhancement WYSIWYG editor file selection/uploading. The editor tool for selecting an image has been revamped to function much like the file manager in the Control Panel. However, you now have additional buttons: one to add media (sound, video, etc) and another to add Flash content. All three tools allow for direct upload while editing your content.
New Feature User uploads from WYSIWYG Editor. Previously, there was no way for members to upload images or any other media for use in their forum posts. Now, they have access to the three tools mentioned above, but all of their uploads are stored in a special sub-directory off the guild root with the format /MemberUploads/memberid. That is their root directory, and they can create sub-directories, drag-and-drop copy files, and directly edit images (add text, skew, rotate, crop, etc). They cannot, however, see the guild root folder or navigate to the root of other guild member folders.
Enhancement Page Footer. The old page footer had a pretty low limit on the number of characters it allowed. This limitation has been eased up, and you may now also specify a background gradient fade and the top edge color and size for the footer area. If you want a solid color instead of a gradient, just select the same color for both the start and end colors. Control Panel > Style Tools > Page Footer or Guild Bar Admin > Site Customization > Footer.
Css For those who use custom CSS, the class for the new footer area is gp5-footer.
Enhancement 8 new GuildWars 2 themes have been added.
Maint Some of you may have noticed the new error reporting form you are taken to when you encounter a run-time error. Many of you who have, have filled out the "what were you doing when the error happened" field, and I just wanted to drop a quick "thank ya" for doing so. The details you provide, along with the actual error details, are both put together to automatically create a new support ticket, which is assigned directly to -- waaaaaaaait for it -- development. Anyway, it makes getting to the cause of a problem much easier and has resulted in many hotfixes over the past month! Oh, and to the individual who typed in "I was sleeping".. lol

Finally, a bunch of bugs were fixed.

8/28 - Trojan False Positive

Aaron Lewis — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:44:02 GMT

Some of you running a couple different virus scanners are running into alerts on your guild sites. They're false positives centered around a trojan called JS:Blacole. The scanners are freaking out about something they don't like in the resource files GuildPortal passes down to support some of the richer client-side control. We use Telerik (a control vendor) for much of this.

They are aware of the problem, and so are the virus scanner developers, who are now (or already have) updating their definitions so that these false positives will go away, and take their ZOMG-factor with them.

For anyone interested, the Telerik threads talking about this are here and here, and at the Avast forums over here, but they've announced they've fixed it, so go grab the latest definitions.

8/24 Release

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 22:49:37 GMT

There are a couple releases rolled up in this:

Those who have topic update notifications sent to their mobile devices (via SMS) will now be able to click a link that will take them directly to the topic on the mobile version of their site (site.url/m).
Clicking on profile links now displays a context menu that provides the following options: Member Detail (displays the window that used to be the only option when clicking a profile link), Private Chat (if they're online), Visit Site (their personal site), Visit Wall, Send Mail and, if you're a roster admin of the guild, a link that will open up the member editor.
The voice server status widget now displays detail for both Ventrilo and Mumble servers. Previously, only Ventrilo server detail was available.
The Global Guild Bar can now have the foreground text of the main bar customized.
The Star Wars: The Old Republic server status widget was hanging when the SWTOR servers were slow to respond, so the duration the data is cached has been increased.
The Who's Online widget will now auto-update its list as members log in and time out.
Links to support videos in the Control Panel Dashboard have been fixed.
New CSS classes have been added for the Shouts widget for those who want to modify the appearance of it at a more detailed level. They are gp-shout, gp-shout-source, gp-shout-body and gp-shout-ally-link. They, along with full descriptions of where they appear and what they contain, are documented in the GuildPortal CSS class listing (available from many of the Custom editor sections of the Control Panel).
The Forums widget would stretch out beyond the boundaries of the page width style settings if any of the forums had a lot of sub-forums. This only happened in IE, but it's fixed anyhow.
The One-on-One Chat area that displays incoming chat was not scrolling far enough down when new items came in. This has been fixed, along with an overhaul of the One-on-One Chat UI.
The member editor grid in the Control Panel now offers the option to export to Excel, PDF, Word or CSV.
The member editor grid has also been enhanced with an easy-to-use filtering control that lets you build complex queries against your member listing. For example, you could easily build a query to return all members with an access level less than officer that haven't logged on for over a year.
The queries involved in reading posts in a topic have been optimized quite a bit, so your forums are a bit quicker.
The border color of Guild Global Bar sub-menus can now be customized.
The size of the content zones (left, center and right) on any guild page can now be dynamically resized by simply clicking and dragging when you are logged in with Designer rights. You don't even need to enter page edit mode.
When updating to the latest version of a widget-type mod, your settings for which page it appears on, the title, and the order were all wiped out. This no longer happens.

8/09 - Couple hotfixes

Aaron Lewis — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:02:12 GMT

There will probably be a few unscheduled pushes today as I finish ruthlessly crushing the problem that was causing the "Service Unavailable" errors over the past couple days. I was up all last night (no pity, I was well-dosed with caffeine!) tweaking and narrowing down.

While I'm pretty sure I hit the problem -- it looked like an infinite loop in the page you see when you click on someone's name -- I'm going to continue monitoring it today and seeing what else I can do to further optimize things, to make better use of the processing power and memory of the web and database servers.

By pushing the hotfixes, I'm also moving some feature enhancements to production that weren't going to be released until Friday. Not a bit deal, and none of them is ground-breaking. One of them is a context menu that pops up when you click on a member link (like in the who's online box or the last poster column in the forum display), which provides a much easier way to view their info, start a private chat, send mail, visit their site, and so on. Little things like that.

Sorry for the service interruptions, thanks for your patience, and as always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal!

8/03 Release

Aaron Lewis — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:14:07 GMT

Some refactoring of required Javascript files was done in order to reduce the number of files that browsers were having to download, which should decrease overall page load times.
Admins now have the ability to customize the appearance of the global guild bar. They also have the ability to disable it altogether, for all visitors to their site. We highly recommend you do not do this however, as many future features may only be available to those who have it enabled.
The window that comes up when you click a member link has been cleaned up, and an error on one of that tabs has been fixed.
In your Profile settings, there is now a privacy option that will prevent you from appearing on anybody's global guild bar when you are online.
The notification of member login window has been made less of a punk in FireFox.
The global guild bar now has a default faded appearance, so you can see the style of the guild site behind it, and it fades in to full view when a member hovers their mouse over it.
A bug affecting searching of guilds from the public-side pages has been fixed.

7/20 and 7/27 Releases

Aaron Lewis — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:22:14 GMT

What was done:

The password reset e-mail was made to include the account names.
Header elements (H1, H2, etc) were set to no padding, causing them to appear flush with the sides of the widget body. Padding was added so it's not so ugry.
A bug causing the "additional options available" prompt to vanish when adding a new widget has been fixed.
A global guild bar (aka GloBar) has been added, which shows the count of members in the guild chat room, provides a list of everyone online, and shows how many unread web-mail items you have. You can disable it in your Profile settings if you don't dig it. Customization options are on the way!
Guild chat room UI bits are all expando-flexy now, so you can resize it to your liking.
The admin command /roomname in guild chat now works.
Apparently, Verizon is mysteriously cutting off e-mail-to-text service for random subscribers, making it impossible for our notifications to get through. If you're a Verizon subscriber and your texts from GuildPortal are not working, head over here for information on how to make sure the e-mail-to-text service is activated: http://support.verizonwireless.com/faqs/TXT%20messaging/faq_vtext_website.html
The news category selection drop-down, which appears when editing or adding a new news item, now sorts and also shows the associated image that will be automatically placed within the new item's body, if there is one configured for the category.
A bug causing the shout box to behave like a brat in certain situations has been fixed.
Several of the third-party components we use have been updated to their latest versions.
The alert window, which appears when a guild mate logs in, has been fixed so that it never shows white text on the light gray background.
Shouts were caching too long, so you wouldn't see them if you refreshed the page immediately after adding one. This has been fixed.
Member titles, set in member admin, have had their allowed length increased to 1,000 characters (5x what it was before).

7/13 Release

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 20:12:38 GMT

Here are the highlights from this week's update:

One-on-one chat now works across public-side (meaning just browsing around GuildPortal), blogs, and guild pages. You'll be notified of chat requests no matter where you are.
Posts now have a link along the bottom for forum moderators/admins that lets them move the post to another forum/topic of their choosing.
Inbox messages now show up on the /m (mobile) versions of your sites.
The guild chat link again displays the count of people in chat.
A new widget, called "Available Achievements and Medals," has gone live. It lists the achievements from the guild that members may earn, medals they may be awarded, and also GuildPortal achievements that are available.
The "Wall" and "About Me" links are now back on the profile page.
Some more work has been put into the Dev Status pages. Next week's milestone is empty, but that just because this week's kept me busy up until the very end. I'll be filling it in on Monday.
RSS links have been added to the issue comments so you can subscribe and be notified when issues you are interested have updates to their status.
The member editor's "Characters" tab for each member now displays a link indicating whether that character is blocked from display on the roster. It also allows you to toggle block status.
The member editor grid displays more rows now.
Achievements (all three kinds) now display on the "About Me" page of member blog sites.
The roster blocks that were mysteriously applying themselves to innocent victims have been slain.
A bug causing the forum moderators editor to come up blank has been fixed.

That's all for now!

Full Text Search

Aaron Lewis — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 16:48:14 GMT

Forum full-text search goes live! There is a link along the top of your forums that says "Search." It has two available modes, controlled by whether you have the "Exact?" check box checked.

If you do not have the "Exact" check box checked, GuildPortal will find posts that match what you type in, but it will also find posts that match based on the meaning of what you have typed in.

If you do have the "Exact" check box checked, GuildPortal will find posts that match what you type in. In addition, you can use operators in your query. For example:

"bad monkeys" (note the use of quotes with phrases) would return posts where "bad" and "monkeys" appeared right next to each other.
"bad" AND "monkeys" would return posts where "bad" and "monkeys" appeared, regardless of whether they are next to each other.
"war*" OR "ever*" would return posts with "warcraft" or "warhammer" or "everquest" or "everquest2" in them.
"warcraft" or "everquest" would return posts with either "warcraft" or "everquest" in them.
"war*" OR "ever*" AND NOT "everquest2" would return posts with "warcraft" or "warhammer" or "everquest" in them, but not those with "everquest2" in them.

You can also do searches for a particular author, whether or not you specify anything to search for in the subject/body of the posts.

Big Update

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:38:24 GMT

Today's update includes stuff and things! Namely:

Added the ability for forum moderators to merge topics.
A new right that you can grant members, called "Designer." Those granted this access will see a link to "Site Design" on guild pages, and when they click it, they will be taken to the Control Panel, but with only the design-related areas accessible.
Added ability to move images between galleries in the editor UI by dragging and dropping them from one gallery to another.
Fixed broken one-on-one chat.
Fixed icons in the WYSIWYG editor.
Fixed the "View" link in the gallery editor.
Fixed the Forum Moderator selection UI.
Fixed forums mass move functionality.
Fixed link to blog when viewing the pop-up profile for a member.
Fixed the gradient builder not saving widget header gradients.
Made the gradient builder open in a larger window, so IE users could see everything.
Updated GuildPortal to the latest non-beta .NET framework, including an update to our tools which should result in improved productivity. :)
Removed the forced delay that made you wait 10 seconds before going back to edit a post you just made.
Fixed the "No Signature" check box not working when adding a new topic.

GuildPortal goes Mobile!

Aaron Lewis — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:56:16 GMT

Although mostly working on support tickets and this nebulous thing I'm calling GP-5 (shhh, Sandy would be furious if she found out). Now, Sandy and I are really going to put our heads together to come up with something for the progression widget.

Now, a lot of people already know that GuildPortal can notify you of things such as when new web mail arrives, an event/raid is starting soon, whether someone replied to a topic that you are subscribed to, when your (or others, if you're an events admin) event/raid status changes are sent to your SMS-capable phone. Also, admins can be notified the instant a new applicant signs up to the site.

For those who didn't know about this feature, open Profile from any guild page, then click Text Messaging to set up your cell phone provider, number, whether notifications are enabled, and which types of notifications you want to receive.

Okay, this next part is a relatively big deal for us. If you go to your site's domain (like http://admins.guildportal.com) and add /m after it, you will be on a site that has some functionality of your full site, but has the added benefit of being much faster to load. So, if you're a member of the Admin Help Community, head on over to http://admins.guildportal.com/m right now on your phone and check it out. If not, try your own guild's domain.

The mobile site was written on jQuery Mobile, and so it should support the following devices with no problems (although not all the bells and whistles may be there on older devices -- like mine. Iphone 1. I swear it's gas-powered.):

The so-called "A-grade" browsers. Full enhanced experience with Ajax-based animated page transitions.

Apple iOS 3.2-5.0 - Tested on the original iPad (4.3 / 5.0), iPad 2 (4.3), original iPhone (3.1), iPhone 3 (3.2), 3GS (4.3), 4 (4.3 / 5.0), and 4S (5.0)
Android 2.1-2.3 – Tested on the HTC Incredible (2.2), original Droid (2.2), HTC Aria (2.1), Google Nexus S (2.3). Functional on 1.5 & 1.6 but performance may be sluggish, tested on Google G1 (1.5)
Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) – Tested on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Motorola XOOM
Android 4.0 (ICS) – Tested on a Galaxy Nexus S. Note: transition performance can be poor on upgradeddevices
Windows Phone 7-7.5 – Tested on the HTC Surround (7.0) HTC Trophy (7.5), LG-E900 (7.5), Nokia Lumia 800
Blackberry 6.0 – Tested on the Torch 9800 and Style 9670
Blackberry 7 – Tested on BlackBerry® Torch 9810
Blackberry Playbook (1.0-2.0) – Tested on PlayBook
Palm WebOS (1.4-2.0) – Tested on the Palm Pixi (1.4), Pre (1.4), Pre 2 (2.0)
Palm WebOS 3.0 – Tested on HP TouchPad
Firebox Mobile (10 Beta) – Tested on Android 2.3 device
Chrome for Android (Beta) – Tested on Android 4.0 device
Skyfire 4.1 - Tested on Android 2.3 device
Opera Mobile 11.5: Tested on Android 2.3
Meego 1.2 – Tested on Nokia 950 and N9
Samsung bada 2.0 – Tested on a Samsung Wave 3, Dolphin browser
UC Browser – Tested on Android 2.3 device
Kindle 3 and Fire - Tested on the built-in WebKit browser for each
Nook Color 1.4.1 – Tested on original Nook Color, not Nook Tablet
Chrome Desktop 11-17 - Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
Safari Desktop 4-5 - Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
Firefox Desktop 4-9 – Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
Internet Explorer 7-9 – Tested on Windows XP, Vista and 7
Opera Desktop 10-11 - Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7

"B-grade" browsers Ehanced experience except without Ajax navigation features.

Blackberry 5.0: Tested on the Storm 2 9550, Bold 9770
Opera Mini (5.0-6.5) - Tested on iOS 3.2/4.3 and Android 2.3
Nokia Symbian^3 - Tested on Nokia N8 (Symbian^3), C7 (Symbian^3), also works on N97 (Symbian^1)

C-Grade Basic non-enhanced HTML experience that is still functional

Blackberry 4.x - Tested on the Curve 8330
Windows Mobile - Tested on the HTC Leo (WinMo 5.2)
All older smartphone platforms and featurephones – Any device that doesn’t support media queries will receive the basic, C grade experience

There is a feedback button there in your member screen. Please feel free to use it. We would love to hear back from you on this. We will no doubt be adding more features (right now, only mail and forums really work completely, oh and the welcome message, underneath the user's start page for the guild).

For more information on graded mobile browser support based upon the JQuery Mobile (which we are using for the /m functionality of your sites) library, click here.

This is not the regular update. There's just been enough testing that I'm comfy letting you all know about it. :)

Tera Stuff and Whatnot

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:38:40 GMT

Today's update included mostly bug squishes. Here's some of what went live:

Tera game news is now up and running with a feed.
Tera Server Status, a new widget, is available.
You can now post drafts to your blog, and come back to finish/publish them later.
Welcome letters are now sent out when they should be.
Some didn't like the in-frame windows when editing content, instead preferring actual pop-ups instead. There is now an option in the Control Panel's dashboard, under a new tab called "Preferences," to enable pop-ups.
Blog links under recent entries will now take you where they should.

RSS Feeds and a Boo-Boo

Aaron Lewis — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:03:21 GMT

Going out today:

Authenticated RSS feeds (for the guilds that use them) have had their token system changed. You will need to update your links.
Forum read/unread icons sometimes not displaying correctly should be fixed.
The Star Wars: The Old Republic server status widget has been updated to work with the changes they made to their site.
Blog links and posting are now working correctly.

Now, for the boo-boo. Yesterday, I put a trigger on the Shouts table of the database that fired when a new shout was entered. The idea was, it would take the oldest shouts over the count of 50 and delete them. Kind of a self-cleaning thing, for performance. Only, I pulled the ones to be deleted back in the wrong date order. The result was, the trigger ended up wiping the newest 50 shouts.

I'm very, very sorry about that.

Some Enhancements and Fixes

Aaron Lewis — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:32:06 GMT

Today's update includes the following:

A rendering fix for the iPhone (things were getting squished!).
The addition of tagging functionality to the custom status change notifications for calendar events. You can now include [username], [eventname] and [eventdateandtime] in your notifications, and they will be dynamically replaced in the messages that are sent out to the recipient.
A bug that caused the custom emoticons section of the control panel to go all whacky has been fixed.
Forum icons now align more towards the top, by the forum title. This will help with forums that have a lot of sub-forums.
Sub-forum icons will now show up when viewing them alongside the topics listing of their parent forum.
The standard roster will no longer show characters without names.
The control panel has been cleaned up a bit.
Blogs now support custom CSS + HTML.

Better HTML + CSS Support is Here!

Aaron Lewis — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 20:15:26 GMT

GuildPortal has just been dramatically improved when it comes to using custom HTML + CSS. First, we've added a "Navigation" selection in the Control Panel (under Custom HTML). Clicking that takes you to three editors. You can modify the code that is output before navigation items (pages on your site), the code that is output for navigation items, and the code that is output after navigation items.

Once you specify the code, you can then use the Full Page custom HTML editor's new tag, $block[nav=html], and your pages will be rendered as the page loads, using your mark-up.

Also, three more tags have been added to the Full Page HTML: leftwidgets, centerwidgets, and rightwidgets. You no longer have to stick with designs that render the main widget body in a tabular format, and can control exactly where your widgets appear.

A new option has been added that prevents GuildPortal from rendering any style information based on your point-and-click settings in the Style Tools area of the Control Panel. This makes it so the only style info comes from your custom CSS, without any interference from GP, except for a few helper rules for margins and the like. You can enable this option in the Control Panel by expanding Custom HTML, selecting Custom CSS, selecting the Full Custom CSS tab, and checking the box at the bottom that says "Disable all GuildPortal CSS Output".

Finally, editors for all of the custom HTML, custom CSS and custom Javascript selections in the Control Panel have been enhanced with the CodeMirror editor, which provides syntax hilighting and automatic tag completion.

These enhancements, in combination with the already existing Banner, Footer, Widgets, and Full Page custom HTML and Custom CSS, provide complete control over how your site looks. Now you can bring your favorite templates from anywhere -- and there are a lot of free template sites out there. Oh, hey, and if you find any really great ones and port them to your GuildPortal site, share them, it's easy! Just open the Control Panel, expand Style Tools, and then click Share Theme.

Here's a snap of a theme developed using custom HTML and CSS from a freely-available one meant for a completely different system:

Events Enhancements and More

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:43:54 GMT

Big enhancements to the calendar system have been made over the past couple of weeks! Here's what's been done:

Event Submissions : Associate-level and higher members of your site are now able to submit events for approval by events admins. When they view the calendar, they have a new button in the top right-hand corner:

When they submit the event, event admins are notified via web mail. When they go to the calendar, if there are any submissions pending, they see the following:

Clicking the button shows them the details of the event, and gives them the option to Approve, Approve and Edit, or Reject the submission.

Simplified Sign-Up: Signing up to an event no longer requires multiple steps. Members can now sign up directly while viewing the event:

In-Line Sign-Up Admin: Like the sign-ups, administrating status and role of sign-ups by event admins has been simplified to a couple of drop-down boxes that appear in-line while viewing the event:

Enter Loot Drops from the Event: Entering drops for an event used to require several steps. Now, it's right there in the event view and much more efficient:

Enter / select the item that dropped. If you start typing the name of the item, a drop-down appears with matching items that have dropped for your guild previously. You can then use your arrow keys or mouse to select any match, or just type in the name of the item if it's something that hasn't dropped before:

Selection of the person who received the item works in the same way. You begin typing, and a list appears with matches:

Here's a partial list of the rest of what's been done over the past couple weeks:

New topics default to "subscribed."
E-mail notification is sent out when you receive web-based mail.
Users can delete their own posts unless the admin disallows it by clicking Edit under their forums, Options, and then checking "Disallow users from deleting their own posts."
Ventrilo server status was fixed.
The calendar now lets you choose between Monday or Sunday as the first day of the week (click Edit under the calendar, go to Display Options, and select the day from the "First Day of Week").
Fixed duplicate characters appearing on the default roster.
Added two new widgets: Rift Addons: Hottest and Rift Addons: Newest.
Event categories now support a background image, which appears on the large calendar display. To configure event categories, click Edit under your calendar, and then Event Categories.
Multiple events may now be deleted at once from the calendar editor by checking the boxes and clicking "Delete Selected."
The EverQuest 2 auto-roster has been fixed.
The forum icon legend now shows if you have custom forum icons, but can be disabled by clicking Edit under your forums, clicking Options, and checking the "Disable forum/topic icon legends" box.
Selected character fields now show up in event sign-ups.
An asterisk is displayed next to events that you have signed up for in the main calendar view.
If there are applicants awaiting approval, the member admin link flashes.
Many Web Fonts have been added and can be selected for your widget titles and widget body areas by going to the Control Panel > Style Tools > Content Boxes (Widgets). Not all of the fonts work with Internet Explorer.
Other miscellaneous bug fixes. =)

Mizus RaidTracker and More

Aaron Lewis — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:45:27 GMT

GuildPortal now supports the Mizus RaidTracker third party Add-On for WoW guilds when used with the EQdkp Plus XML export option for loot drops. Because of its superior functionality and popularity, it replaces the GPHelper add-on for this functionality. For more information, open an event follow-up and select the Loot Drops option.

Aside from numerous other minor bug fixes, the following also went live:

Event sign-ups are now numbered.
"New Activity" link from forums main view shows you new topics since the last time you logged in.
Tooltips of most recent posts have been improved, especially for quoted items.
"Deleted" shown in sent items next to read status when recipient deleted the item.
Selected mail folder now bold.
Fixed info section editing problem.
Multi-event days now say which event is blocked from sign-ups, or available to be signed up to.
Fix for bug when editing an alliance event.

Raid/Op Groups and More

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:45:16 GMT

Two new widgets go live today! The first, Raid/Op Groups, lets you group individual characters that are associated with your guild into groups for raiding, with the ability to specify role. For example, you could have "Monday Night Group 1" as a raid/op group and it could have five characters, each with their roles ("DPS", "Tank", "Heals", etc) specified.

The second is the EQ2 Server Status widget, which displays the status of the server your EQ2 guild plays on.

Welcome Letters and Idle Monitor

Aaron Lewis — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:26:03 GMT

Welcome Letter goes live with today's update! When you have one set up, it is sent out to people when they have their access level to the site upgraded from public to member (or higher). To start using this, open your Control Panel and click Welcome Letter.
The Idle Monitor will now let Super Admins know who received warnings for inactivity, and who was automatically disbanded.
The Mass Move functionality in the forums editor is now working correctly.
$block[variable] tags now work correctly in mods.