Community update
Hi everyone, we are recently coming off of our first really major issue since our release. Starting on the distributions for September 23rd until October 3rd the calculation server became halted. The exact reason for this was because of a missing calculation. How did a calculation get missed? Well every night at 12:05am EST our stats servers pulls the text file from Stanfords servers to find all the newly credited FAH points. Once in a while the Stanford servers are not ready at 12:05am. When this happens, our servers dont pull anything and the day is skipped. When this happens, our server needs to be told to include the missed calculation in the next payout.
Since I was out of town, I never told the server to include the previous day in the calculation. So when the server tried to recalculate on the 25th, it did not see an entry for the second day in a row. When this happens twice in a row, the server thinks to completely start over, which is why many of you saw the calculations on the 25th as the overall stats since the beginning of FoldingCoin. From that point I tried to reach James but he was unavailable so I attempted to fix this issue on my own on the 29th and was unsuccessful, so the stats server had to stay down until a solution was found.
On Friday I began looking for another developer to come in and help resolve this issue since I was still unable to get a hold of James. Joe Looney, the developer of the Tokenly Pockets wallet volunteered to help out and fix our issue. Joe worked very hard on Saturday and Sunday this past weekend to fix the problem and he was successful in doing so. Calculations are once again presuming. Now that calculations are going once again we can breathe easy, but there are a couple things over the next few weeks that need to be accomplished before we are at 100% again:
- Since we did not pull Stanford stats each day when this issue happened, 10 days in a row had been included in one Stanford file. So to find the amount of FLDC each person is owed, the stats for each day of 9/24-10/3 are included together in one large daily snapshot. Then instead of dividing 500,000 FLDC, we instead divide 5,000,000 FLDC among the folders.
- Because Joe needed to work on his own server, the DB is currently split on two different servers, September 23rd and before continues to reside on the FoldingCoin servere, but for calculations on the 24th and continuing will currently be found on Joe’s server.
- Since the goal of the weekend was to get us up and running again, stats are being calculated on the server and in the database, but the statistics will not automatically upload to a webpage like they have in the past. This doesnt mean that they arent calculating, it simply means that for the time being, we need to upload these manually for your displaying purposes.
- With the recent BTC transaction attack that has been going on, the LTB share distributor is currently being reworked by Nick Rathman at LTB. So for the time being we cannot send out the back logged FLDC until Nick gets the issue resolved.
- Since Joe had to rewrite a lot of our code in order to get it to work on his server, we will take this opportunity to re-implement the calculation server and statistics to get ready for a more feature rich program to go through FLDC data easily.
- James contacted me yesterday after all of this. James was really busy with his work and couldn’t step away. James also informed me that his local charity he works for is going to need his time more over the next year, so James will have to take a step down as the Lead Developer for FoldingCoin for the time being. James still looks to contribute as much as he can in what free time he will have, and he is also willing to train the next developer coming in on how our system works.
- FANTOKENS from BlockLabel will be added as soon as possible once the main issues with the calculation are fully resolved, we apologize to the BlockLabel project for the delay in releasing FANTOKENS on Merged Folding.
I cannot thank James enough for his contributions to the project. For more then 1 year I have worked with James almost every single day and his dedication to the project has been unmatched. I know his local charity needs him, and I’m glad and grateful that he will train whoever takes his spot at FoldingCoin. What started as an idea on the LTB forums from me, turned into what we have today because of James Sewell, and I would not be writing this right now if it wasnt for him. We look to continue the development of FoldingCoin without James and I already have some developers I am talking to lined up to take his spot.
Though this blog is not reporting the best news FoldingCoin has ever had, I assure you that myself and Jonas will continue to attempt to grow this great idea into something much bigger.
