Okay so here's what's been going on. On Friday the 14th, sometime around 8am Eastern, UMD suddenly stopped getting purchase authorizations from our biller Epoch. People were getting charged but not getting their purchases activated. This still isn't resolved and I've been working with Epoch's developers ever since, and continue to do so now.

Meanwhile I have been reconstructing carts and manually adding everybody's purchases, so that's why the huge delay. There were also tons of duplicate charges to refund folks who paid twice thinking the charge didn't go through, some people whose carts were never saved, and so on. I revamped our stored cart/activation system for better reliability, and built other functions to recreate the other missing carts from our logs and also activate the missing subscription purchases. The most important thing was to audit every transaction to make sure everybody got what they paid for, and that producer sales were properly recorded.

I still have yet to get a resolution for us not getting those auths, so I have been building a parallel system to automatically enter the purchases the way I've been doing them manually, using our biller's database directly. Every time you hit your purchases page now, if a new purchase isn't already there, UMD double-checks in realtime to see if there is a purchase that's not yet authorized that's waiting for you. Even so, there will still be a delay up to 10 minutes because that's how long Epoch takes to even populate that info. I continue to work with their devs on bringing back those realtime pings, as our new systems should only be for backup. I don't really blame Epoch though; We're a really old client who has demanded bespoke changes to THEIR system over the years just to work with our unique site, so our situation is a bit foreign to some of their devs. But we'll be aight.

There are still a few people who haven't gotten their purchase or subscription, and a few duplicate purchases, so I'll make sure they're taken care of as a priority. I'm also still getting back to the few hundred inbox messages that I have. Going fast as I can, but I promise that nobody will slip through the cracks.

Separately, our bank had messed up a few weeks of physical checks, sending them to the wrong locations due to a glitch in their system. Some of them had even been made payable to and cashed by the wrong people. That's been a tough one, but everything has been audited and settled now. All affected producers have been contacted, and they will get a reduced processing percentage fee of 20% (that's the lowest I could go) for the week of sales between this past Friday the 21st and ending at the end of Thursday the 27th.

As for the server outage that happened on the afternoon of Friday July 31, well that sucked. I was working on routine maintenance and server speed-ups as usual, and ended up upgrading something that necessitated updating the next thing and then the next thing. No point of return, I ended up having to upgrade the entire server stack at once on a freakin Friday.

Now everything is much more secure for our site and our server, but we are still experiencing pictures not getting saved in some places, edge case bugs, settings that still need to be opened back up for our big demands like large file uploads, etc. I am alerted to every bug an am working on UMD's code all the time so things will get better.

For the producers affected by that weekend's outage, I will be resetting the launch dates and What's New entry for everything launched that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. If you also want a forum plug date changed, or anything like that, please contact me directly.

Thanks to everyone for being so understanding and kind... like 99% of people were completely forgiving, even though everybody had the right to be angry! I'll move this post to UMD Dev after a few days. Again, please contact me directly if anybody needs anything.

JFC, it's a wonder you're alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmW-ScmGRMA

As an IT guy by trade reading all that made me twitch. Dealing with 3rd party vendors is such a pain in the ass some times

Gosh I do not envy you for any portion of that . As always, appreciate all that you do!

Is this something we should anticipate?

Thank you MM, you really do a great job and tirelessly keep us updated and things working behind the scenes

Thanks for the information;
You are doing everything possible; don't worry, we'll be fine. I hope everything goes well for you, and...
Best regards to everyone.

Oh dear sweet Jesus...I'd be crying in fetal position. TOO MUCH of that sounds relatable (Database vendors, and health insurance companies for me though), and I'm not looking forward to waking up tomorrow

Rest well friend, next I see you guys I got the beers.

Ouch!

That really is a double-whammy (or possibly a double-wammy ).

Having been there with a minor update that snowballed into a completely unplanned and out of control full system upgrade and rebuild on a live production server, all the sympathies in the world and then some. Events like that burn themselves into your memory. Ouch.

And the Epoch issues on top of that just to compound everything - arrghhhhhhhhh!

Has Cthulhu arisen? Chaos and madness to all mankind?

Ouch, and ***hugs***

And in amongst all this I spotted a system improvement, used to be when you accepted a friend request the details instantly vanished along with whatever message they'd typed, so unless you'd had the foresight to right click their username and open in a new tab, and copy and paste the message to a text file, ***before*** you clicked accept, the details and message vanished forever. But I noticed last week that now, you click accept and the details stay on screen (with "Accepted" where the button was) and the previous one remains visible too - which is a major and welcome improvement in functionality. Ta for that.

I had the same question! lol

Yikes!!! Us: man are we going crazy or is there a glitch?

MM: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Keep up the good work!

MM, you are a saint!

Thanks MM for keeping everything going.
I cannot imagine how much work you have been doing, but it is greatly appreciated!

I've come to understand that not every producer may have wanted the release dates advanced on their scenes to make up for that weekend where the site was offline for most of the time. I know a lot of time, money, and effort goes into making these scenes, so I was trying to make up for screwing up your weekend launch dates. The changed dates might cause chaos with how you wanted to have the scenes sequenced or something like that.

Since the scenes have already gotten a weekend of extra exposure, I was going to reset their dates back to the originals. But then I thought if I did that for everybody, it might cause even more chaos.

So any producer who wants me to restore the original dates of the scenes that were moved, please let me know.

I haven't been able to open messages it whites out screen
And can't send chat
Fir a while even trying to Leone log in site was ding the white out screen m, is it just me ?

Thank you for your great work on this lovely site! With all the trouble that arises from time to time.

I started as an excited round lurker and at some point 2013, I tried to make a messy shoot not just for the fun and sake of art, but to post here.

Thank you for making this possible!

Let the pleasure continue to all of us.

Love from Berlin, Germany. Cheers!

Yeah I had trouble opening messages a few hours ago but it worked fine just now & was able to send.

I base my browsing of scenes on what displays as released within the last 48 hours. If you back-dated release dates on new releases, I probably didn't see them, nor would anyone else who does the same thing.

Actually I forward-dated them so they'd have another chance at the top.

Thanks for setting me straight.