Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

[Daniil posts live from a café near the museum. He has no patience for typing responses, and his own visage should explain why. His nose has recently been broken and reset. He looks exhausted and irritated, but he has a duty.]

I need a couple people to come down to the café near that absurd museum with the sewn up fruit exhibits. Bring a stretcher, we have a patient who could use some more urgent treatment.

[From somewhere offscreen, a voice that is distinctly not Daniil’s states:] This Etrayan shot me in an attempt to get information I did not possess. I would appreciate his removal from my presence.

Now- That’s not true at all. That is not the reason you were stopped. [Daniil now regrets making a video, but what’s done is done. ]

[ Video feed of Vax'ildan shows the half-elf rogue on the outskirts of the city park. Normally, it would look a lot busier with zombies walking around, but it's eerily quiet. ]

Uh, earlier, Maya and Tristan were able to release the souls of a group of the undead in the park. Although their spirits have moved on, their bodies remain. I'm going to bury them. If anyone wants to lend a hand or have another way of respectfully caring for the departed, come on down. A little help to do this quickly before I'm set upon by other undead or enforcers would be appreciated.

I brought shovels. Some fire was used when we fought them off… so it smells pretty bad.

And don’t let this give you a sense of false security. The zombie threat isn’t gone. It’s going to keep happening so long as the son of a bitch responsible for tethering souls to their broken bodies isn’t stopped.

[ Another thought occurs, though he's not sure what to make of it. ]

Also, on my way back here, it seems like the dead don't actually... see me for some reason. If anyone needs something and can't get it because of the zombies, I don't mind trying to fetch it for you.

[ooc: There's no log for the burial. If you offer to help, handwave your character participating however you'd like. Vax will thank you for your assistance. ]

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

[ this time maya is on video!!! she looks Super Serious for once. weird. ]

The dead here have had their souls severed from their bodies. Some of them... I can't sense their spirits at all, and with the undead, the souls are outside their bodies, and tethered to them. That's why.... it's all so messed up.

I've talked to several spirits, and they say a tall, lanky man with brown-ish hair did this to them. We need to find this person and stop them.

Does anyone have any information?

[ ooc: she's talking about scylla! ]

I'm looking for a dog. Medium to large, age doesn't matter. Willing to trade for it.

If you've got a dog did you find it here or ask/use points to get it?

[Approximately 22 hours after arriving in Pollux, any mission-going Etrayans gets notified of a new post on their internal network with an unfamiliar username. The post loads, refreshes itself randomly, and even displays strange screen effects sometimes when loading in.

( cw: glitch graphic + yellow font + quirk typing )