Good morning! It’s been a rough day, with Quizlet experiencing its first major downtime ever. Quizlet is now back and rolling as normal. I believe the problem started around 6 AM, and has just been resolved at 12:45 PM. My sincerest apologies go out to everyone who couldn’t use Quizlet this morning.

Some errant multi-gigabyte server log files were running up my disk space and causing the MySQL server to not allow new data and eventually just shut off. The good news is that no data was lost, and everything can just pick up where it left off. This isn’t really my area of expertise, so I’m digging in and figuring out why all this happened and how I can prevent it in the future. It’s safe for the immediate future.

I arrived at school this morning and several friends informed me that Quizlet was down. I fortunately arrived early enough to run home and start figuring out the problem (contacting my host, Joyent) before school. I got back to school (we’re taking those stupid STAR standardized tests all this week) and fortunately I was in a room with plenty of computers so I could monitor the bringing-up progress. Then just a few minutes ago Joyent’s support staff came to my rescue and got everything back up. I’m on lunch break now, but I’ll be available later today to resolve issues. If you have any problems, please send me a message.

-Andrew

Hi.

There was a bug in learn mode this morning that was causing it to fail terrifically . Sorry, it was completely my fault.

Not that it matters to anyone, but the problem was one character in my 30,000 lines of code. I found the right character to fix though

It’s fixed now. Thank you to the 17 people who reported it. Sorry again!
-Andrew

Update: it appears I had it programmed right on my local copy, but there was a bug in the code that synced the files from local copies of Quizlet to Quizlet.com. So um, I just reuploaded EVERYTHING in case the problem happened to more than just the Learn page. If you’re still having problems, you can email me at andrew at the domain that this website is, or AIM me (sn: Harc Serf).

Sorry again.

This afternoon, the file for Learn mode get mysteriously wiped. I’ve restored it from my code repository and it should function fine now. I’m looking into the cause of this problem, and if you notice any other issues, post them here. I was making some small updates to Quizlet today, and some saving problem must have arisen. Thank you to the people who reported this problem.

While I’m here, I might as well give a quick update on Scatter. I’ve built it to work outside of Quizlet (as well as inside it), so you will be able to embed it in your own site as a sort of widget. I’ve been testing it on some other sites, and it works beautifully. I’m really looking forward to releasing it! Today I also completed the automatic saving of “Ignore” and “Prompt” preferences. These features will be released in the next major upgrade of Quizlet.

Even more tangential, I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.1 today. It’s a great update, I highly recommend it if you use WP for your blog.

The move to the new server seemed to have gone smoothly. If you notice any issues or errors, let me know through the contact page.

Hey everyone.

I’m getting super excited to launch. After 450 days of work, Quizlet will launch on January 17th. It’s been a long ride, and I’d like to thank all of you testers who helped it get where it is now.

Now, on to business. Quizlet may be having some outages in the next few days. I’m going to be transferring the Quizlet.com domain name to a new, stronger server. This server will make Quizlet much faster and will be capable of handling the load when thousands of people start pouring into the site . It may also cause problems for up to two days, starting sometime tomorrow (will be announced).

Let me explain the process a little more thoroughly. Quizlet has to switch its DNS records from one location on the internet to another. This process is not instant – it can take as long as 2 days to finish. The reason is that ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, etc) save Quizlet’s server location on their own computers in order to speed up access for their users. The thing is, they only update this data every few days, so it can take a variable amount of time for the process to complete depending on who provides your Internet services.

Now, this probably won’t cause any immediate problems. Quizlet.com will always show up with the Quizlet website during this whole process. The problem is, there are two possible locations of Quizlet that it will show you, each one an identical copy of the other. Now, this would be all dandy if you work with any data for the next few days. I’m copying the database from one server to the other – so if you enter any data after I copy the data to the new server, your data will be lost.

During this whole process, I will clearly mark which server you’re on. If you’re on the newer one, you can feel free to use Quizlet freely and not worry about anything. If you’re on the old one, I will put a big warning on the site saying your new data will be lost. Note, if you do enter data into the old server, Quizlet will still function, just your data may disappear when you randomly arrive at the new server. All of your data from before the switch will be available. If you enter new data on the old server and you really really really need it restored, I can manually restore it for you, so send a note in the feedback box on the top right corner.

So, until I make an update to this post, go ahead and keep using Quizlet normally. When the switch commences, I’ll make another announcement and have all sorts of banners telling you what to do. Relax.