Around 36 hours ago the chat room on Vizzed went down for an unknown reason. I've done all I could to try and get it back up but with no luck. It gives me a "Invalid license key, failed to start" error so I tried and contacted the creators of the chat room. Hopefully they get back soon. If they don't get back to me by Monday, then I'll try completely reinstalling the chat room software and if that doesn't work, I may have to resort to different chat room software (most likely CometChat since I already have a license for that).

For the time being, I'm using the play window chat for the netplay lobby chat. It looks odd because it's formatted for the play window.

Well, some of us were hoping that it might have been something you were working on, but if it's possibly a problem that can only be solved by contacting them, I don't really have hopes that this is something that can be solved quickly, but hopefully it does.

Kind of on board with zander on this. If it's their problem, I'm feeling like it won't get solved that soon. I don't think re-installing the software will work either, but if we lose nothing from trying it, then give it a shot.

We all know that CometChat doesn't work perfectly anyway, but if at least allows for the chat room to be up, it's better than nothing.

Best of luck in sorting this out soon, whatever option you end up doing.

I can't wait to see who shows up if we install a new chat software again. I'm sure people will hear about it and start showing up to cause trouble.

I know I would if I had been banned from the site and found a small way back in to cause trouble. I'm mean like that

But seriously, I hope this gets resolved soon. Dealing with something like this feels like such a waste of time when the software should be working properly.

zanderlex : At the time it went down, I don't think I was working on anything. The weird thing is, I can't even access the chat admin panel. Another time when I got that invalid license key error, I was still able to access the admin panel.

EX Palen : Reinstalling would result into having to reset the entire thing yet again which would be annoying lol. CometChat actually has come a long way since the version Vizzed currently uses. It's pretty flawless now days and while the chat room it offers is incredibly basic, it also has more features than 123 flash chat.

geeogree : CometChat actually integrates with the site's database better than 123 flash chat so I could easily make it so banned users can't access it. In other words, I have far more control over CometChat. CometChat probably has less issues and vulnerabilities as well since it's constantly being updated (probably every 2 or 3 months) while 123 flash chat hasn't been updated since 2014. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather stick with 123 flash chat but I'm just giving my reasons why it wouldn't be so bad if we ended up having to settle with the Chat Room that the latest version of CometChat has to offer.

Davideo7 : that's good to hear! I may have looked at a worst case scenario of this but I sort of feel like that's what I need to do just in case. Glad to hear that we won't have to deal with that. I don't want to go in and add a bunch of chat bans all over again.

geeogree : Just in case there was any confusion with what I said, it'd be able to know who was banned on the site but it wouldn't be able to know who was banned in the 123 flash chat since that data is stored in the database within 123 flash chat.

Davideo7 : no worries. The really important chat bans are also mirrored with a site ban. There are likely only a handful of people with permanent chat bans that we would have to worry about visiting the chat. As long as we have some moderators set up to handle them it shouldn't be a big deal.

Davideo7 : I have a few of the names of the banned people in an excel sheet.

Is it just me or has the site been running a little bit better ever since 123 Flash Chat went down?

Davideo7 : now that you mention it there is a noticeable improvement in loading times that I've observed. Pages seem to be loading considerably faster than usual.

It might be worthwhile to run the flash chat on the same server as minecraft server if that's possible. Having those run together rather than on the server with the forums might be a better idea. Just a thought

Davideo7 : How much better is it running for you?

I think that Vizzed is loading a little faster, every render is under half a second, but other than a slight speed increase its running pretty much the same. I don't really see any huge improvements. 

geeogree : Actually the flash chat does run on the Vizzed.co server with the Minecraft server. The 123 flash chat makes a lot of connections to the site and site's database though in order to retrieve information so it is possible that those connections were potentially slowing things down.

Barathemos : Pages seem to be loading maybe around 25%-50% faster but that might also be because there's less than normal traffic on the site. Not sure. I haven't had the site go unresponsive yet like it usually does every few hours for minutes at a time.

Davideo7 : You were aware of the site going unresponsive? Huh, I thought you didn't lol.

And yeah, I haven't had that happen either, I had thought maybe it has just been the site working better, or maybe you had fixed something. 

Oh. Yeah, that makes more sense. Too bad though that it causes strain though. All it is checking for is a username and password combination being correct and valid so I'm a bit surprised that it could be causing that much strain. =/

It might be worth using each own on their own and checking to see how strained the server is over the course of a day to see if it is worth keeping the flash chat around or considering a different one. I like the flash chat but if it is causing the site down times it might be worth changing in order to solve that problem.

Barathemos : I've been aware of it as long as it's been happening, I just haven't been able to figure it out. It'd be awesome if this was the cause of that the entire time because then it'd mean that problem was finally resolved. Let me know if the site does that again.

Now that you mention it, while pages seem to load faster, it's not running that better overall. I still have had the page go unresponsive this morning, and I remember a recent Gateway Timeout by yesterday, after chat went down. Probably it doesn't happen as frequently as before, but it still happens.

After the many good things you've said about CometChat I almost don't want 123 staff to repair the chat room Just the fact of how often it's updated is enough proof of how dedicated the staff are at it.

EX Palen : You're still going to get the gateway timeout when the site runs it's daily queries which happen at around midnight central time. Also, some of the servers restart at I think 5 AM central time. Could you tell me what time it went unresponsive?


geeogree : You wouldn't think it'd cause strain but it's also possible that it makes more connections than necessary. There's also always active sleeping connections to the DB server from the chat room which I've never understood. It's possible that the 123 flash chat is just poorly coded.

Also, I ran some tests. Here are the average render time of pages on Vizzed for the past week or so:

04_09_16
AVG Render Time: 1.8993699 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,016,837

04_10_16
AVG Render Time: 1.7906069 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,007,120

04_11_16
AVG Render Time: 1.8278688 seconds
Total Page Views: 926,921

04_12_16
AVG Render Time: 1.8261932 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,117,062

04_13_16
AVG Render Time: 1.6568981 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,117,062

04_14_16
AVG Render Time: 1.6923949 seconds
Total Page Views: 873,849

04_15_16
AVG Render Time: 1.5169294 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,058,438

04_16_16
AVG Render Time: 1.6443921 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,103,859

04_17_16
AVG Render Time: 1.7705137 seconds
Total Page Views: 1,098,269

04_18_16
AVG Render Time: 1.6492634 seconds
Total Page Views: 841,291

04_19_16
AVG Render Time: 1.6398928 seconds
Total Page Views: 968,345

04_20_16
AVG Render Time: 1.6102346 seconds
Total Page Views: 910,441

04_21_16
AVG Render Time: N/A
Total Page Views: 828,185

04_22_16
AVG Render Time: 1.7307941 seconds
Total Page Views: 801,075


I'm not sure at what point the chat room went down for sure but it looks like things started improving as of Wednesday and even more so as of Yesterday. I looked at Google Analytics and there was no sudden drop in traffic for those days so either this is because of the removal of 123 flash chat or it's something else that I'm unaware of.

Hmmm, this morning it was like at 1-2 PM, which means 6-7 AM central time. And whenever I've got the Gateway Timeout, it surely wasn't any of those two time slots you mention.

And just as I was heading here to reply, the site has started to take its time to load the pages, so I can definitely confirm I see no change with the chat down or up.

EX Palen : I was also having render times in the 5-8 second range a few minutes ago, and right now it is back down to sub .5 second renders.