Site's back up

[Bobadventures]

Well, ComicGenesis is back up after being down for a day or so. The forums were the last bit to come back online. I'm certainly relieved, and grateful to the folks who fixed it.

Time was, this wouldn't have worried me, but the way people have been talking on the help forums for the past couple of years, I was seriously worried that this might be "it" and that CG and my comic might have gone poof.

Maybe I'm worried about nothing, but just how stable is ComicGenesis these days? The impression I get from these forums is that it's slowly dying. CG has been a great home for me over the last nine years, but I'm afraid these days that it might just disappear out from under me some day. Am I worrying needlessly?

I have all the individual strips and graphics from my comic backed up on my hard drive, and I've maintained a (rather lackluster, but functional) mirror site on LiveJournal for eight years now -- so if the worst happens, I can keep the mirror site updating while I reconstruct a new home site elsewhere. I'm thinking the time may have come for me to finally do that.

I see that no one else has commented here on the recent outage at all yet, which is kind of spooky in itself. Of course, I'm not sure how long the forums have been back up. Yoo-halloo? Anybody out there?

[[geoduck]]

Sadly, while I like the CG setup a lot and have been using it since 2003, it IS dying and yes, you should be prepared to find a new home. I've got a backup site going at http://comicfury.com/, which is a much more going concern, it appears. Doesn't offer the FTP loading that CG does, but does include a lot of nice bells and whistles including in-house commenting and transcription services, if you want to make use of them.

[ColdFusion]

Comicfury doesn't have FTP uploading? Oy. Does it at least have some form of batch uploading and automatic generation? Because that was my backup plan but if it's not good...
Yeah I'd really like to hear from some admins if any are still around. At the very least it would be nice to have one working e-mail address we can send things to, as admin, abuse, and tygris all fail, so when the forums are down, what are you left with?
Actually as far as I can tell, it all went down on the night of the 1st, then came back up on the 2nd, then went down again on the night of the 3rd, and is only just back up now. Worrying, I tell you.

[STrRedWolf]

If you missed your update window, please go ahead and run a manual update. We had to shut off manual updates today until I got a chance to go in and smack the updater some.

And yes, I'm still around. New job, but better resourced... and a bit demanding. How that plays here is to be seen.

[[geoduck]]

Comicfury doesn't have FTP uploading? Oy. Does it at least have some form of batch uploading and automatic generation? Because that was my backup plan but if it's not good...

It offers a page where you can plug the info on up to ten strips (strip file, name, date, extra text, etc.) into the provided forms and upload them. Still takes a lot longer than using FTP. Not sure what you mean by automatic generation; it does automatically post strips on the date which you assign to them on uploading. Or immediately if you're backdating and filling in your archives.

[Bobadventures]

Hi STrRedWolf. Thank you very much for getting things back up and running! I'm grateful.

[Bobadventures]

Thanks also, [geoduck].

[ColdFusion]

Glad to see you're here, STrRedWolf. We appreciate it

As for page generation I meant the way CG does it. It just generates a page based on a template so you don't have to have a ton of html pages made and saved. But yeah 10 at a time would take hours for my archive, that's out.

[[geoduck]]

Glad to see you're here, STrRedWolf. We appreciate it

As for page generation I meant the way CG does it. It just generates a page based on a template so you don't have to have a ton of html pages made and saved. But yeah 10 at a time would take hours for my archive, that's out.

It does do that, you just upload the actual file and any extra info you want attached to it (chapter name, dialogue transcript, etc.). One thing I do not like is that the archives are not date-based like CG, but numerical starting with 1, so if you're filling in an archive, the specific page name for each strip can change.

[Isukiyomi]

Glad to see you're here, STrRedWolf. We appreciate it

As for page generation I meant the way CG does it. It just generates a page based on a template so you don't have to have a ton of html pages made and saved. But yeah 10 at a time would take hours for my archive, that's out.

I was sweating bullets when the site went down Thanks for the save STrRedWolf!

[Bobadventures]

Hi, the Updating system appears to be stuck again.

[ColdFusion]

I'm actually getting an "untrusted connection" / "invalid security certificate" warning for siteadmin. I think I'm gonna wait just in case this downtime was something a tad more malish. But I hope we hear something about it soon.

[Bobadventures]

Well, if malware is becoming an issue, then I'd better confess that for years I've been uploading my comic images via an online ftp site called https://ftp.net4india.com/, because I haven't been able to get siteadmin's uploader or net2ftp to work right for me in ages. Online reviews insist that it is a safe site, which is why I have continued to use it -- however, over a year ago I was advised on these forums to stop using a third party ftp because it might not always stay safe.

So, although I don't think I did it, if it's even possible I could be responsible for a virus finding its way into the system, then believe me that I'm extremely sorry.

Exactly how are you guys uploading your comic jpg's these days? Is there some piece of software I should get?

When explaining this, just for the sake of argument, PLEASE pretend that I'm a forty year old artist who can barely code his way out of a paper bag. You won't have to pretend very hard. Or, at all, actually. I use a Mac, if that matters. Thank you.

[ColdFusion]

I'm pretty certain that's not how it works. You couldn't have infected all of ComicGenesis.
siteadmin and net2ftp go down from time to time, usually not both at once, but they both work for me currently. That's not the issue. The issue is without siteadmin you can't trigger a manual update, and automatic updates appear not to be working.
For the record though if you want another alternative FTP, fireFTP works. By all means start a new help thread, I bet you could get some useful tips and a walkthrough.

[ColdFusion]

So hey, I just wanna confirm.. everyone else is getting those "untrusted connection" warning messages on siteadmin too, right? Because if it's just me that suggests " this error could mean that someone is tampering with your connection." according to it. I reckon since it happened right after an outage, I shouldn't be too worried. But I'm reluctant to add an exception when obviously something's broken if automatic updates aren't working.
(watch now that I've posted this, it'll automatically update itself tonight. isn't that always the way)

[Dragonaur]

So hey, I just wanna confirm.. everyone else is getting those "untrusted connection"

I'm seeing

Strict Standards: Resource ID#17 used as offset, casting to integer (17) in /home/space/siteadmin/public_html/mysql4.php on line 217

...messages when I login to siteadmin to give the refresh command. FTP was giving me a warning too but took the file. I use Filezilla to do the job.

[Bobadventures]

So hey, I just wanna confirm.. everyone else is getting those "untrusted connection"

I'm seeing

Strict Standards: Resource ID#17 used as offset, casting to integer (17) in /home/space/siteadmin/public_html/mysql4.php on line 217

...messages when I login to siteadmin to give the refresh command.

Yeah, that's what I'm seeing at my end.

[ColdFusion]

No no you guys, that's what happens when you go to siteadmin without the https in front. So you mean you've never been able to do manual updates? You just let the automatic updater work? (does that mean you're unable to edit your other pages?)
Well in any case, the automatic scheduled updater isn't working for you, right? Because I've uploaded my new file to ftp and it hasn't updated. Maybe we should PM redwolf?

[Dragonaur]

I used to be able to do everything via the http siteadmin. But uploading the image started failing a year ago or so. So I use an FTP program to get the image uploaded. I typically backdate the filename of my newest comic image by one day. Then I'd use http siteadmin to do a regular update. Even now it says there's one comic in the queue after I update, but nothing is happening. Still same old page up front.

From what I'm seeing I'd wager you've got an integer overflow on your hands. But of course, it could be anything.

[ColdFusion]

That's interesting, you're saying until recently the http siteadmin worked for you? It hasn't worked for me in years, only the https version works, along with quickadmin. That is, until this warning appeared. I'm very tempted to just ignore it and go through, if we don't get some kind of helper attention soon.