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Site News #8: Darn Robots, Get off my Lawn!

This used to be a nice neighborhood!

Hi, everyone.
We didn’t want to do this, but for our protection and yours, we’ve had to implement a registration captcha. Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed we were suddenly receiving many new user registrations. At first, this was exciting news, but under closer examination, they were a bunch of usernames that appeared to be a random string of characters with bogus email addresses attached. Therefore, measures were needed to mitigate this problem, so began the search for anti-spam solutions.

There is good news though, and the good news is twofold. First, currently the only page that is affected is the new user registration page. That’s the only place that has been harboring trouble lately. Second, the solution is silent, so when a new user registers legitimately, they won’t have to click all the squares with stoplights in them. That said, if it comes to it, we will not hesitate to implement stronger solutions.

This site is to be as simple and welcoming as possible, so we will not be implementing annoyances like this unnecessarily. We’ll certainly react to any issues becoming a problem, but until then, we are really not interested in having our audience prove their innocence. Adding site security measures such as this also poses philosophical issues that we must internally reconcile as well. As proponents of digital privacy, we do our best to be good stewards of any potentially identifiable information (of which, very little is captured – pretty much only email addresses). However, the more measures we have to put in place here to verify people are who they say they are slowly erodes privacy and increases sharing across the web. For example: Google’s reCaptcha API collects the source IP of each request, and is thus subject to Google’s privacy policy, which we all know to be problematic. Though, to make it clear: as it stands now, no information from the anti-spam solution in place is shared with any third parties, as it does not use Google’s API. We want to ensure it stays that way for as long as possible.

If these darn robots would just stay away, we wouldn’t have need for all this pesticide in the first place…

That’s all for now. Stay safe, everyone! Protect your online privacy, and watch for some (hopefully) new content here.

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Site News #7: Routine Changes

Hey guys, it’s been way too long since the last site news, but better late than never?

To start off, you’ve probably noticed the new theme. This will definitely require some more work, as right now, it’s far too stark for my tastes. As with any new theme, it’ll require a bit of a learning curve, as I’m not sure what the best way to liven it up is… However, it was designed to coexist well with WordPress’s new editor, which also has an uncomfortable learning curve.

All this is to say: I need to learn CSS.

Next, the privacy policy has been updated to include some new verbiage and to accommodate some new plugins that are being used. All links should be up-to-date now as well.

Finally, some additional security measures have been put into place.

It really surprises me how much people are determined to break into any site, big or small. It just goes to show that security by obscurity is nothing to lean on. Using the new security measures, I’m alerted to any potential tomfoolery anyone tries, and can take steps to mitigate it.

That’s about all there is for now. I just thought I’d let you know that we’re still here… we have to say that far too often.

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Site News #6: Site is Offsite

Hello, everyone.
It’s been a while. Did you miss us?

Patrick and I had both ended up taking a hiatus from this site and its works while he was in school. You had heard from me a few times regarding some infrastructural changes to this site in preparation for another wave of hard work this summer, but once those were all finished, there wasn’t much left for me to do.

That’s over now, and here we are stirring again to bring you, if nothing else, some more opinions and points of interest to get you through the summer months.

Before the show got started, however, I wanted to be sure to meet my goal of getting this site hosted offsite, and lo and behold, the time has finally come! With it, we also invite a new change of top level domain. As you probably have seen now, we’ve done away with “cheesewatergames.tk” and are now chesewatergames.net. Although the site shows no appreciable change externally, it brings a positive change of perception from the outside world. It brings Cheese-Water Games one step closer to legitimacy. Hopefully it’ll make it easier for you all to remember us too.

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Site Migrated!

That was hard.

Well, it could have been worse. At least this site and everyone’s usernames were transferred correctly.

I won’t bore you with the details, but basically this required two nights of very little sleep to get migrated to the new server. In a couple days, the old one will be turned off, and you shouldn’t  notice, but I’m running them in parallel for the time being in case I really need to fall back.
As you can see, the media here is, let’s say.. lacking. I still have a few folders to transfer over, but as soon as I can (read: today), I’ll get them moved over as well.

Next project is to get this renamed from “cheesewatergames.tk” to “cheesewatergames.net”. That should be exciting…

Edit: Content moved over. The site is pretty again and you should be able to download everything.

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Site News #5: About That Outage – and More!

Let’s first address the elephant in the room:
No outage occurred over the week that I had promised.
Why?I had some hardware configuration headaches with the new server that I needed to get sorted first. The good news is that it’s now up and running as a secondary server, and I’m in the process of slowly moving things over. Luckily, according to the WordPress docs, the process for migrating a WP site from one server to another is as simple as copy/paste. I doubt it will truly be that simple in practice, but hey, I’ll try whatever.
Perhaps this weekend I’ll find time to finally migrate everything once and for all.

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Planned Holidays Outage

Hello and Merry Christmas everyone!

I’m here today to inform you of the Christmas gift that our website will be receiving in the next week. A major server migration will take place starting Wednesday evening (December 28) and likely completing Friday, December 30. During this time, access to this site may be impossible, but we will attempt to maintain the highest amount of uptime as we can. Upon bringing the site back up, our hopes are that nothing changes from the user end. As always, though, please bear in mind that there may be some bugs lingering in the days following.

Peace~

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(Hopefully) Brief Outage Today

Just as a formality, because I’m sure nobody will notice, there will be a planned outage today at… now o’ clock.

I need to upgrade PHP from 5.5 to 5.6 since 5.5 isn’t supported with security updates anymore. That way nobody gets any ideas…

brb

Edit: Huh, that was surprisingly easy

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Site News #4: Quiet Month

One could definitely say that there is no point in saying anything if there is nothing to be said. However, I personally don’t like silence from sites and services that I frequent, especially the smaller ones that are prone to dying easily. So in a case like this, I’d rather make a, “yes, we’re still alive” post than keep you guessing. Reading material, if nothing else.

So like the title says, this has been a quiet month. Not much has happened with the site apart from a little WordPress update. I am still definitely

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Site News #3: Time to Clone

Happy Halloween everyone!

This month’s announcement is a little less exciting than last. Not much has changed lately, except for one thing.

Electric’s source code is now properly obtainable through our own Git implementation found at http://creamery.cheesewatergames.tk/rdmarsee/Electric.git
To download the code, you can either follow that link and click the little download button to get everything in your favorite compressed archive format, or use a git client on your desktop

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Site News #2: SSL and Creamery

Hello again, everyone.

As you may know, this site has suffered from the lack of SSL encryption since the first day it was online. In those early days, I didn’t really know or understand the importance of encryption in general. As I gained more and more experience, it became disturbingly apparent that encrypted connections were imperative to not only my own security, but the security of all our subscribers.

However, I still hadn’t the motivation to both generate a key and have it signed (although I did generate an unsigned one for my storage use). Finally,