Looks like someone wrote us a poem! If we look in our records we can tell in what order the usernames were created and use that to untangle the poem:

YET THE CARDS THEY WERE STOCKED IN A WAY THAT I GRIEVE
THE CARD COLORS ARE PECULIAR
THAT FOR WAYS THAT ARE DARK AND FOR TRICKS THAT ARE VAIN
IT WAS APRIL THE FIRST AND QUITE SOFT WAS THE SKIES
WHICH IT MIGHT BE INFERRED SOLITAIRE WAS LIKEWISE
YET THEY PLAYED IT THAT DAY ON DAVID AND JIM
IT WAS SOLITAIRE. THE SAME HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND
WHICH I WISH TO REMARK AND MY LANGUAGE IS PLAIN
WHICH THE SAME I WOULD RISE TO EXPLAIN
BRET HARTE: THE HEATHEN CHINEE (September 1870)
WHAT A FOOL, WHAT A FOOL

It’s a riff on an old poem, and very funny . Hats off to kingfisher for using his mad replaying skills in a clever way. We both thought it was an great prank.

That’s the result of a traffic accident (possibly a drunk driver, but that’s hearsay) that happened at about 4:30am on Sunday morning. The pole that was knocked down cut out power to the city block where the Green Felt server lives. We were waiting for the city to fix the power issue and get everything back on which happened at about 3:00pm today.

Sorry about the outage! It wasn’t our fault, per-se, though we should have had a back up server ready to go for strange unplanned cases like this.

The end goal is to fix the slowness and gateway errors that people have been seeing lately. We’ve basically doubled our popularity in the past 8 months and that is putting some strain on our current computer:

We’re not quite done yet–we still need to do a database upgrade which will be happening sometime in the next few days (our guess is this is going to be a low traffic week). During the database upgrade the site will still basically work but you won’t see any high scores until the upgrade is done.

Addendum (2011/11/24): The database upgrade is done (only took half an hour) and so the maintenance is more or less done for the time being. Let’s give it a week and then let us know if you’re still getting gateway timeouts and slow page loads.

Everything we can do to fix the problem has been done, now we can only wait for our changes to propagate through the internet. If you are reading this, everything is fine again.

All the games that were played last night have been imported into the new DB so the leader board should be accurate at this point.

Don’t worry about any “internal errors” you see… They should probably say something about the database being down… but they don’t.

Happy Halloween!

One thing we’ve noticed is that many players click “New Game” really fast, over and over. This is presumably because they are looking for a new game with the cards dealt in some specific way that makes the game look easier/harder/more fun.

If this describes you, we’d love to know what exactly you are looking for. We don’t mind that you do it—we are just wondering if there is some way that we can improve the site so the cards that get dealt are exactly what you are looking for, automatically.

So, serial “New Game” clickers, leave us a comment here and let us know what you are looking for. Also may sure you mention the game, since the criteria for a good game of Sea Haven Towers is probably different than that of Forty Thieves.

Thanks!

At any rate, the bug is now fixed and so if you were unhappy with how the “automatic” setting was working we invite you to try it again. Please let us know if it now chooses the correct size for your browser window.