Young Writers Society

WriterFeedPad will be inaccessible on June 9th beginning at about 2am US East Coast Time (7am in the UK, 11pm in San Francisco / Los Angeles / Vancouver, 4pm in Sydney). The downtime should last no more than few hours, although it may last as long as 24 hours for a minority of users.


What's Happening?
Note: The below is somewhat technical and it's not necessary to read.

WriterFeedPad has been experiencing a lot of issues related to downtime. However, these issues seem to be all related to either user firewalls or domain name server issues. In other words, it's not WFP that's really having problems but rather internet connections.

I think the way to fix this is to make WFP run on port 80. All computers have what are called ports, into which information goes. On a computer, port 80 is reserved for internet traffic. But right now, WFP runs on port 9000 (hence the :9000 after all WFP addresses).

The reason it runs on port 9000 rather than port 80 is a bit complicated, but suffice to say that both YWS and WFP cannot run on the same port.

So what I'm doing is moving WFP onto its own dedicated server. That way it can run on port 80, and all issues should be resolved. Doing this doesn't take too much time. Rather, what takes so much time is for your network to recognize the new server. Nowadays, this can take as little as 15 minutes (it used to take days). But usually it takes at least a few hours, and if you live in Africa or the Balkans, it can take a couple days.