World of Card Games

The site will be down for a couple of hours due to a hardware issue at the server starting in about 35 minutes. Sorry for the interruption in games! Hopefully, the work will be done quickly. It is supposed to take up to 2 hours.

The server company where World of Card Games is hosted is having some network issues (this started at Aug 24, 15:08 CDT and appears to be ongoing).

You may be able to play games, but might experience problems.

If you see things that look strange, like cards piled up, please reload the web page in your web browser.  The F5 key works to do this for some systems. If you get a blank page loading, wait a short while, and try reloading the page again.

The server people have let me know that they're looking into the problem but I do not know when it will be resolved. My apologies!

Update August 25 at 9:10 CDT. The server company says that the problem has been resolved. It was a networking issue from one of their upstream providers. And now you know as much as I do! Sorry for any interruptions in your games!

There was a server outage this afternoon from about 5:25 PM EST (Boston USA time) to 5:47 PM EST. It was a networking problem at the server. My apologies for the interruption in your games!

Thanks to everyone who reported the outage tonight! I'm really sorry about that... There was a problem at the server and I had to restart it. So far as I can tell, everything is running smoothly now. Please let me know if you notice any other problems.

The server experienced an outage yesterday evening at approximately midnight EDT. The site's host was doing maintenance work that was not expected to affect any of the servers, but in fact it did. I'm sorry for the disruption, but there's nothing I could do about it! Here's the message that I got from the site's server facility:

While performing a scheduled network maintenance, an unexpected error condition occurred resulting in a service loss on the public network in several network aggregation zones. Maintenance activities were immediately rolled back and service was restored upon doing so. All systems are now operating as expected.

It is rare for the site to suffer an unexpected outage like this. It lasted for about 20 minutes. By now, things are back to normal. For what it's worth, if I know about an upcoming outage, I always put up a notice at the site one hour in advance of it. But unpredictable hardware problems can disrupt service, on rare occasions. Once again, my apologies! [Note: the few players whose Elo rating was impacted by this event have had their Elo rating restored to its previous value.]

There was a brief outage last night around 7 PM Central US time. It lasted about 10 minutes, and was caused by a network issue at my hosting service. I'm sorry, but there's nothing to be done when this kind of thing happens. I've been pretty happy with this service, but even the best have trouble on rare occasions! I appreciate your patience when such problems occur.

The site now has a mechanism that looks for problems with your internet connection, and lets you know if it finds something wrong. This mechanism is not infallible, so it may not detect all problems. But I hope it will help.

Error Lost Internet

I rarely get internet problems, and when I do, it's pretty clear to me what has happened. I'll chat or click a card, and nothing happens! I'll quickly check another reliable website such as Google, and find it's offline too... and then I'll check my router and find that my internet is out. I'll have to call my internet service provider (ISP) to find out how long the interruption will be.

I've had a few people tell me that sometimes they'll get dealt a hand, and one card is missing! I believe this is due to a short internet glitch. Usually all you need to do is reload the page in your browser to fix this. The new network notification should help with this problem too, but I can't be sure. Cards never go missing for me, and so it's hard for me to tell what causes this problem.

If you hover over the notification, you'll see a tooltip that reads "Check internet connection! Click to reload page". Clicking the notification will reload the page in your browser. But that will only work if your internet connection is working. If it's not, then a page reload will fail. So double-check your internet if you see this message.

I've written another post about how the "stats info" panel works; there's been a minor change. Check that out if you use that feature.

The site was down for a few minutes while it was updated for bug fixes this morning. Apologies for the interruption in your games! It's now back online.

There is one minor change that you may notice. The redeal feature that is available in Spades and Double Deck Pinochle has been modified so that players are given 30 seconds to redeal if someone leaves the table. This is true regardless of whether the game is paused or not. I hope this helps those who found that they were not able to agree upon a redeal before the game restarted.

Hey everyone, I got reports of 3 outages: 1 today and 2 yesterday. They were fairly brief, so far as I can tell - a few minutes in length. It helps if people report these to me. So do not hesitate to let me know if you experience a problem with the site! Screenshots can be helpful if you know how to take them, too.

I plan on restarting the server tomorrow morning, as a precaution.

The site was down for a couple of hours this morning. Sorry for the inconvenience! I'm investigating the outage.

Sorry for the disruption in service this morning! The site was down for about 10 minutes to apply some changes.

A bug has been fixed in 29. You may have noticed that sometimes a trick looked like it was going to the wrong player (it wasn't counted that way, it just looked like it). This bug is now fixed. A big thanks to Kaycie, who reported this - that was very helpful!

World of Card Games was down for a brief time this morning, while some updates were applied. My apologies for the interruption in your games.

There are now 7 new avatars! Enjoy!

World of Card Games was down for a few minutes this morning. Sorry for the interruption everyone! It's back up now.

Hi all - there's a possibility of a brief outage overnight tonight (Wednesday Dec 24, between 1 AM and 6 AM CDT). This is due to a network issue mentioned in my previous blog post. My hosting service tells me the site will probably experience a brief outage for about 1 minute, but it could be up to 15 minutes. Ugh. My apologies, but there's nothing I can do!

Last night, from about 1:15 AM CST to about 6:10 AM CST, there were sporadic network outages at World of Card Games. My apologies! This was beyond my control - my hosting service had network issues due to a software problem. They seem like a good, reliable service, and they're working on fixing the issue. I don't expect any more problems at this point.

The server is now up and humming again at World of Card Games! Sorry for the interruption in service.

A new feature has been added to the Spades game. If a player leaves the game, the remaining (human) players are given the opportunity to fold their hand and re-deal. All current tricks taken and bids made are wiped away - the hand is effectively a do-over.

To make this happen, all players must agree to re-deal by clicking the "redeal" message box, which appears in the upper left corner. Redeals are allowed a maximum of 5 times per game.

redeal link in upper left corner

This is a new, experimental feature. As always, feedback is welcome. In particular, if you notice any problems, please let me know.

[Edit: as of December 27, 2015, you are given 30 seconds to vote for a redeal.]

World of Card Games will be down for about 4 hours starting Saturday, December 13, from 9:45 PM CST until Sunday, December 14, 2 AM CST. Here's a link to the time window in worldtimebuddy: scheduled downtime.

The outage is due to my server being moved, so it's not something that I have any control over. If the site is up any earlier than planned, or if there is any delay, I'll post a note here.

The server was out for about 5 minutes this morning, so that some bug fixes could be applied. Sorry for the disruption in games!

I've attempted a fix for the blank screen bug. I was not able to reproduce it reliably, but I could find one case where it rarely happened, and I've fixed that. Please let me know if you see it again!

I've also received reports that the table listings are sometimes incorrect - empty, when they should not be. This appears to have been caused by the "blank screen bug" as well, so it should be corrected now. (Keep in mind that an empty table listing can sometimes occur - it just indicates that there are no tables with seats open at the moment.)

There are a couple of other bug fixes that you can read about in the changelog at the site (under "about" > "show change history").

I'll take this opportunity to let everyone know that there will be a longer outage on December 13, from about 10 pm - 2 am. The company that hosts my server is moving the server to a new data center. Sorry but there's not much I can do about this! I'll post another blog the day beforehand to remind you.

The server was out briefly for an update this morning. Sorry for the interruption in games!

The update included a couple of changes. There was a bug in Gin Rummy which caused bots to time out, occasionally. Thanks to everyone who reported this! I found a problem which caused that, and fixed it. Please let me know if you see any other problems.

The drag-and-drop functionality in Gin Rummy has also been altered slightly, so you can now see the card that you've picked up to sort. I hope this makes sorting a little easier. Also, sorting now works on tablets - at least on the devices that I have available for testing. Let me know if this does not work for you.

Finally, the Hearts robots have been tuned up a bit, so they will no longer be so cooperative towards someone attempting to shoot.

World of Card Games will be down for scheduled maintenance for a short time on September 28 (Sunday), at 2 AM EDT http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140928T02&p1=179
 
Sorry for the inconvenience! As usual, a message will be posted on the site in advance, to give everyone some warning. The outage should only last about 10-20 minutes.