Tweet
Hi everyone -
There are going to be some changes coming to Cryptograms.org shortly so I wanted to give you some advanced warning here. If you play any of other other sites you might have already noticed in the last few weeks that we've been gradually bringing many of our game sites together under a single sign-on environment on the main puzzlebaron.com domain. Acrostics, Word Searches, Drop Quotes, Clueless Crosswords, Crossworders and Sudokus have already been moved over, and Cryptograms will likely be next.
What will change
Hopefully the migration will be relatively seamless, but there are some things that probably will not make it over. Private messages are one example - if you have any PMs that you'd like to save for posterity, please make sure to do that ASAP (i.e. copy and paste to a local file on your computer) as I'm 99% sure those are not going to make it in the migration. Avatars I'm less sure about - they haven't made it in previous migration attempts but I will do my best to preserve them. If you have an Avatar image on your account that you 100% want to keep, be to sure to save a local copy of that avatar image to your computer so that you can reupload it later in case it is lost in the move.
Forum posts - I'm going to do my best to preserve all forum posts and bring them over to the new site. You may not be able to edit or search them however after the migration.
User accounts - every user account will be brought over, and passwords should remain unchanged, but there may be some occasional conflicts that I will have to fix manually. If you find post-migration that you can no longer login just email me at puzzlebaron@gmail.com and I will reset your password.
Email addresses - this one is important. We've traditionally kept email addresses "optional" during user registration, but that's not going to be an option after the upgrade. If you currently have an account with an email address that looks like "unknown@unknown.com", I would highly recommend you update it with your current email (via the Settings link at the top of the page). The new system is going to require email addresses for all new user registrations, and those without an email (or with a fake email) may not be able to access their accounts or reset their passwords after the migration.
Game statistics - all of this will carry over, but there will be a small window of time during the migration where game stats for a few hours (or maybe up to 48 hours) will be lost. This is unavoidable and I can't fix/replace individual statistics after the move. So if you care about solving percentages, be sure to log out of your account when you see a message posted here that the migration is about to begin. When you see a message posted that says the migration is complete it will be safe to log back in and resume playing.
When will this happen?
I don't have an exact time right now but I'm planning for this week. I've got a new server coming online shortly and will need to do some prep work on it first before the migration can start, but I will give a 24-hour heads up here on the forum with an estimated time/date once I have more information.
What's the upside?
Single sign-on is going to be a big plus, but that's not the main benefit. Having all of our sites on a single, standardized platform is going to give all of them a significant performance boost. I'm also upgrading our server architecture/hardware, updating and streamlining our source code and installing several new software packages that should make things a lot faster and more reliable as well. My hope is that these changes will eliminate the occasional "server burps" we've been experiencing where a page will randomly take 10-15 seconds to load, or the site will become unavailable for 5-15 minutes at a time.
So apologies in advance for any interruptions and thank you for your patience! I'll keep posting updates here until the migration is completed.
Stephen
There are going to be some changes coming to Cryptograms.org shortly so I wanted to give you some advanced warning here. If you play any of other other sites you might have already noticed in the last few weeks that we've been gradually bringing many of our game sites together under a single sign-on environment on the main puzzlebaron.com domain. Acrostics, Word Searches, Drop Quotes, Clueless Crosswords, Crossworders and Sudokus have already been moved over, and Cryptograms will likely be next.
What will change
Hopefully the migration will be relatively seamless, but there are some things that probably will not make it over. Private messages are one example - if you have any PMs that you'd like to save for posterity, please make sure to do that ASAP (i.e. copy and paste to a local file on your computer) as I'm 99% sure those are not going to make it in the migration. Avatars I'm less sure about - they haven't made it in previous migration attempts but I will do my best to preserve them. If you have an Avatar image on your account that you 100% want to keep, be to sure to save a local copy of that avatar image to your computer so that you can reupload it later in case it is lost in the move.
Forum posts - I'm going to do my best to preserve all forum posts and bring them over to the new site. You may not be able to edit or search them however after the migration.
User accounts - every user account will be brought over, and passwords should remain unchanged, but there may be some occasional conflicts that I will have to fix manually. If you find post-migration that you can no longer login just email me at puzzlebaron@gmail.com and I will reset your password.
Email addresses - this one is important. We've traditionally kept email addresses "optional" during user registration, but that's not going to be an option after the upgrade. If you currently have an account with an email address that looks like "unknown@unknown.com", I would highly recommend you update it with your current email (via the Settings link at the top of the page). The new system is going to require email addresses for all new user registrations, and those without an email (or with a fake email) may not be able to access their accounts or reset their passwords after the migration.
Game statistics - all of this will carry over, but there will be a small window of time during the migration where game stats for a few hours (or maybe up to 48 hours) will be lost. This is unavoidable and I can't fix/replace individual statistics after the move. So if you care about solving percentages, be sure to log out of your account when you see a message posted here that the migration is about to begin. When you see a message posted that says the migration is complete it will be safe to log back in and resume playing.
When will this happen?
I don't have an exact time right now but I'm planning for this week. I've got a new server coming online shortly and will need to do some prep work on it first before the migration can start, but I will give a 24-hour heads up here on the forum with an estimated time/date once I have more information.
What's the upside?
Single sign-on is going to be a big plus, but that's not the main benefit. Having all of our sites on a single, standardized platform is going to give all of them a significant performance boost. I'm also upgrading our server architecture/hardware, updating and streamlining our source code and installing several new software packages that should make things a lot faster and more reliable as well. My hope is that these changes will eliminate the occasional "server burps" we've been experiencing where a page will randomly take 10-15 seconds to load, or the site will become unavailable for 5-15 minutes at a time.
So apologies in advance for any interruptions and thank you for your patience! I'll keep posting updates here until the migration is completed.
Stephen
Comment