Unscheduled downtime and maintenance last weekend

Last weekend, we had a pretty big problem where elasticsearch crashed and our notification system didn't let us know an essential service was down until we found it out ourselves. We use elasticsearch instead of a traditional database for a lot of queries, because we found elasticsearch to be faster and more efficient when doing things like browsing posts. But, when it goes down, a lot of functionality is lost.

You may have noticed that there were not a lot of posts made over the weekend. That's because we have a problem with search failing and not being able to make posts. So it was pretty quiet. Elasticsearch going down also broke browsing games and posts in the official GameSense Android App, throwing a few errors. Because actually finding your posts needs elasticsearch, it has to be running to make posts, or else people are going to freak out and get no error message, their post will be made but it won't show up in the app or on the home page when browsing. This is somewhat of a design flaw we are hoping to fix soon. We have also been having problems with the gmail app and our mail servers. The app really loves to work, then get updated and stop sending emails to my phone, then start working again.

Everything is fixed and back to normal. We lowered the memory settings for elasticsearch and lowered some other settings so there's less fighting for the memory we have on our servers. GameSense.co has been growing, and we've been trying to add more servers to meet demand, but sometimes things break like this. So sorry. We run GameSense.co as a hobby, sort of our ideal way to find games, and soon to meet gamers once we roll out our social update. We haven't really made a profit yet each month but we keep things going because we believe in what we are doing. Please consider disabling adblock if you are using it. We use a new type of advertising network that's based on cryptocurrency and is far more private that the major ad networks, and we try really hard to make ads as UN-invasive as possible. We are mostly a bunch of old school gamers who really care about privacy, we had to get others to talk us into joining the major social networks to feature our posts, for example.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to grow and make things work with our limited resources. On another note, we did break 3,000 registered users a few weeks ago, which is a pretty big milestone. We hope you will enjoy the social and backlog update which will make following games and gamers a lot more enjoyable and useful than the typical generic notifications about new videos.