Hey all –

We just recovered from a couple hours of downtime. It wasn’t too fun, for you or for me. The database that was holding each set’s words and definitions had been crashing for the past few days, causing daily downtime (ack!). So tonight I decided just repairing it each time wouldn’t do, so I converted some of the database architecture to a (hopefully) better and more robust state. I also temporarily disabled the “online now” icons, which were causing some problems. I’m hoping to reinstate those as soon as possible - but right now I want to make sure the site just stays up, you know?

We’re in the process of hiring a sysadmin, so we should have a lot more expertise on this problem soon. Going down every evening is not acceptable. Sorry to everyone who couldn’t use it while the site was down.

I just built this super cool system for translating Quizlet’s interface into different languages. You can already use Quizlet to type in data in other languages, but this will actually translate Quizlet’s English interface (the navigation, the instructions, etc.) into other languages.

It’s ready to be translated into any language (except maybe a right-to-left language like Hebrew). So if you’re fluent in any language other than English, send me an email at andrew@(quizlet’s domain) with what language you can translate Quizlet into and a little about yourself and your fluency level. Experience with (very) basic HTML will help you, but it’s not strictly required. You will receive credit in the footer of every page on the site for people using your language. The system for translating the site is super slick - you’ll enjoy it!

I’m also looking for an expert systems engineer to work on making Quizlet faster. If you’re interested, I’ve posted the details on Craigslist, and I won’t repeat them here. Thanks y’all!

Hey everyone. Sorry for the rough stretch today. I just got Quizlet back up after some pretty heinous downtime. Everything should be 100% back to normal, and none of your data should be lost. Feel free to moan in the comments.

UPDATE: Some users have reported finding their groups deleted. I’ve tracked this problem down to some code on the groups page that will delete a group when there are no members in the group. When the Quizlet database was up-and-down today, sometimes the users table was not working but the groups were. So groups that were visited when the users temporarily disappeared may have gotten deleted. Fortunately I have a back-up from early this morning with all of the groups. It looks like about 15 groups may have been deleted. I’m going to work on getting those back up as soon as possible. Sorry for the trouble.

UPDATE 2: Restoring the data from today’s early-morning backup went very smoothly. All deleted groups should be back up. Post in the comments if you’re still out. Sorry again.