First of all, we want to say a huge thank you to all of you for sticking with us during this difficult time. We’re really sorry for all the delay – the last few months have been a nightmare. We had several problems that were combining to cause all of the site crashes.
Firstly, Hollow Art had become so big that we were at 100% disk usage on our previous server, with no way to escape our hosting contract and unaffordable fees to rent more disk space from them. We were also being hit by thousands of spam attempts in a day, which were slowing the site down to unusable levels, plus filling up what little disk space we had with crap.
We’ve now upgraded to new hardware (with different people) that has plenty of space – enough that we’re looking forward to the next 1,000,000 icons being posted!
In an effort to curb the spammers, we’ve also made some changes. The one that you will notice the most is that comments on sets can now only be made through Facebook accounts. We appreciate that many of you like to keep your gaming and real lives separate and thus having to use your Facebook to comment isn’t ideal, but we need to do this to keep the site up and running. We thought about this long and hard and hopefully you will agree that this is a small price to pay. You will not, however, have to use Facebook to request sets. We’re going to be keeping set requests largely the same as they were before. Because of this, we still have some work to do there so, for now, you still can’t request sets. Hopefully that will be coming in the next few weeks.
You can, however, go ahead and post content once again. You can open new accounts again. You can send us your RPG adverts again.
The other big change you will see is if you’ve been hotlinking from the site. Prior to now, we’ve never said anything either way about hotlinking. We’ve never specifically allowed it, but we’ve never asked you not to either.
From now on, you won’t be able to hotlink individual icons from Hollow Art, sorry. That does slow the site down and whilst we don’t think that hotlinking formed a huge part of the trouble we have been having, every little helps.
Those of you who had been previously hotlinking from Hollow Art may have found that, over the last few days, your links stopped working. That is not an error. We’ve changed the root of all our icons, so those links no longer work. If you hotlink again in future, you are likely to only see a ‘hotlinked from Hollow Art’ icon instead of your icon. Please find a hosting site to upload your icons before use. Thank you for your understanding and help to keep our site up and free to use for everyone.
As with any new system, there will be a period of changeover where you may experience bugs, gremlins, and monsters. If you do find any, please let us know and we will hunt them down and fix them.
We have been experiencing ongoing issues with Hollow Art over recent months. We have taken various steps to combat these, and site stability has improved lately, however the root cause of the problem continues to allude us. This has caused great frustration to everyone - you and us.
Most of the problems now seem to be grouped around the posting of new content to the site. As such we have taken the decision that, for now, we will suspend the ability to post to the site.
What does this mean for me?
The site should remain stable. We shouldn't have to keep taking Hollow Art on and off line to fix little issues and you will be able to access all of the 18,000 or so icon sets that have already been posted on the site.
You will not, however, be able to:-
Post new content. This means that if you have been routinely, or occasionally, posting sets to Hollow Art, you will not be able to do so now.
Make requests. You will not be able to post requests to the site.
Have requests filled. Our lovely volunteers who fill requests will not be able to post to Hollow Art either. Even if you ask them very, very nicely, they won't be able to help you.
Make comments. We know you were thinking of posting a thank you to our fabulous volunteers, but sorry - you can't do that right now, it'll have to wait.
How long will this last
Honestly? We don't know. We can't give you a timescale until we know what's wrong with the site. We have some tests we want to run and some investigations planned. Please do bear in mind, though, that this site is run as a hobby. We know it's huge, but it's not a professional business. Everyone here is a volunteer. There may be ads on Hollow Art, but the income barely covers the cost of hosting the site (in fact some years that cost comes out of our own pocket). We all work full time.
Thank you all for your support and patience. If you have any comments you wish to make, please post them on our facebook page.
Hollow Art has had ongoing issues, which we are certain a lot of you are aware of. We are still investigating the cause of these. We have tried several fixes, but the root cause of the problem continues to allude us.
Whilst site stability has improved lately, we still have issues surrounding the posting of new content. As such, to preserve the site and its accessibility as much as possible, for the foreseeable future we are closing the site to new content.
What does this mean for you?
This means that you will still be able to access the icon sets which have already been posted to the site. That means that you will be able to access around 18,000 icon sets.
What you will not be able to do is:-
Create a new account
Post new content
Make requests
Comment on posts
Log in to your account
What we will be doing
We will be taking this time to investigate the site problems and conduct tests to help us bring back the suspended functionality.
How long will this take?
Honestly? We don't know. Until we know what is wrong with the site, we won't know what we can do to fix it. Please bear in mind that this site is run as a hobby for all concerned. We do not run this site for profit (the adverts you see barely cover the running costs) and we all have full time jobs. We're trying to do our best to keep this site going for you. We understand your frustration: we feel it too.
Thank you for bearing with us.
If you have comments or questions, please direct them to our facebook page.
