Apollo: News

[Len]

Maintenance
As pointed out in our recent announcements, we've conducted some maintenance on the site. Unfortunately, during the process memcached died which meant nothing was being cached and the sheer number of queries on each page load being run overloaded the server. We've since fixed that issue, got our scheduler back up and working, most notably that people should be getting BP again at the proper hourly rate.

As a result of this, we've brought our Gazelle into a modern age, moving off PHP 5.6 to 7.0, moved off the depreciated php-memcache to php-memcached, and added composer to handle new classes we write and test but via PHPUnit. Please let us know if you find any bugs in our Bug forum. 

Hermes
As those of you on IRC may have seen, we've spun up our replacement of the APOLLO bot, Hermes. Hermes has replaced the legacy python2 zookeeper code with shiny python3, using the pypi IRC library and proper exception handling and recovery. There's still some minor issues to be fixed, but it's leagues better already and features the wonderful ability of updating itself via Git. To add to this #announce has come back and the bot is happily announcing new uploads.

On a sadder note, this does spell the incoming end for EnterBot as he's been fully replaced by Hermes now. Please update your IRC scripts to use hermes as EnterBot will be retired in a couple weeks most likely (EnterBot will start issuing a notice about being discontinued soon when using enter command).

Logchecker
There's been questions floating around about the grace period, rescoring, etc. Tied into the maintenance and composer, we've brought in using chardet to better handle logs that get encoded in non-UTF encodings, better handling logs in Russian and Japanese. While we're pretty confident on handling logs encoded in the cp-* codepoints, Japanese logs may still have issues as there's several different translation files floating around for EAC versions. Sprinkle, we fixed some bugs that existed with uploading multiple foreign logs for a torrent. Please continue to report bugs you find.

With these improvements in place, we plan to finally kick off our rescoring of old logs. Now, because of how the initial implementation of the Logchecker, it has required us to try and acquire the log files of all torrent files with them so that we can properly store the raw log for scoring/viewing. Now, while we start processing, please be aware that we could not get all logs from all torrents and so we could not rescue them.

Starting Monday (1/1 00:01 UTC), we kick off our grace period that will last two weeks ending on 1/15 00:01 UTC. During this grace period, we will allow trumping of torrents that are 100% but lack a valid checksum by the users that uploaded them, and then starting 1/15, they will be trumpable by anyone. This is only for albums that are marked perfect other than their checksum. Albums with deductions are open for trumping by anyone.

Enjoy the holidays and please continue letting us know how we can improve on our forums and IRC as we enter 2018 and hopefully continue bringing new and exciting new features to the table.

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