Let me start with an apology. I am extremely sorry for this recent Subscribe-O-Matic outage and the trouble it has caused. One thing I’m personally always proud of is the reliability of our service. Even though we host thousands of groups and help you send millions of messages each month, we haven’t had any major outages in the last 3 years, apart from a few minutes of maintenance every now and then. Yet in the last 24 hours, Subscribe-O-Matic was unavailable for over 8 hours. So what happened?
Even though we have started switching away from MediaTemple (our old hosting provider) in March, there were still a few fail-over services running on our old server. And more importantly, the DNS records for Subscribe-O-Matic were still hosted there. A few hours ago, MediaTemple became a target of a DDOS attack which resulted in their DNS servers becoming unavailable. This rendered all their services and customer sites unreachable, including Subscribe-O-Matic.
Even though we do have a fail-over server, it still relies on DNS service being operational. I already moved the DNS records to our new provider, but the changes need some time to propagate across the net. At the time of this writing, MediaTemple engineers have managed to restore most of their network availability, so Subscribe-O-Matic should be reachable by most of you. I’m also implementing some changes in how we handle situations like this to make sure a similar outage doesn’t happen as easily.
I received a lot of messages about the outage and even though I’m not able to reply to each and every one, rest assured I’m working hard on getting this situation resolved – I understand how much trouble and frustration this has caused to many of you.
For more information please follow us on Twitter or check MediaTemple’s Twitter feed.
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To pave the road for the upcoming Subscribe-O-Matic upgrades, we’re moving the service to a shiny new server (and a different datacenter). I’m not expecting any downtime (hence the short notice), but there might be a few short disruptions in form of not being able to send messages or new members not being able to subscribe, since we’ll be locking the database for write access while we migrate everything.
You might also experience some slight slowdowns during the day until the DNS changes propagate over the internet properly. Here’s a quick breakdown of the move:
- March 7th 01:00AM – 02:00AM PST – database move: you won’t be able to send messages during this time and members won’t be able to subscribe/unsubscribe.
- March 7th 03:00 AM PST – service and website DNS change: DNS will be updated to point to the new servers. I don’t anticipate any disruptions, but you might experience a slight slowdown until your objects in-world are actually connecting to the new server. In extreme cases, the DNS changes might take between 24-48 hours to propagate across the internet.
- March 8th – blog and support portal move: no disruptions planned.
I’ll update this post as soon as the move is complete.
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If you ever wanted to offer discounts to your Subscribe-O-Matic members, give out special loyalty gifts or if you’re simply unhappy about freebie hunters that unsubscribe as soon as they check your group for freebies – we have just released the right tool for you.
Subscribe-O-Matic Member Discount Vendor is a simple, easy and free add-on vendor script that allows you to reward your loyal members with discounts or even free gifts while other customers pay the regular price for your product.
You can grab it for free at our in-world location here, or on XStreet here.
Overview
While Subscribe-O-Matic already enables you to send freebies and gifts to your members, this simple vendor gives you more options to fine-tune your loyalty rewards. For example, you can set up a discount (or a free item), which applies only to customers that have been your members for over 3 months.
The vendor is extremely simple to setup and packed into one simple lag-friendly script (with no active sensors or listeners). There is also an example vendor prim included inside the package that you can use as a starting point.
Although it’s not meant to be used as a full feature-rich vendor replacement, it has all the features you would expect from a simple vending script (properly handles refunds for over-payments, sets the Pay buttons with prices, etc).
Usage examples
So how or why would you use it? Here are a few examples:
You have a brand new clothing item that you normally sell for L$200. You would like to give a 50% discount to everyone that’s been a member of your group for 60 days or more, while everyone else can buy the item for the regular price. Or you are selling your discontinued clothing line product for L$20, but would like to offer it for free to all your members. If you worry that people would join to your group just to snatch your free item and unsubscribe, you could set it so you have to be a member for over 3 days before you can get the item for free.
Fine Print: although this is a free add-on, you need an existing paid (or non-profit) Subscribe-O-Matic subscription plan.
I’m excited to get some feedback, so don’t be afraid to post any questions, suggestions or issues in the comments below.
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We recently got a Holiday e-card from Google, stating they donated US$ 20M to charity organizations around the world. We immediately wanted to match their donation, but our CFO found out that we are a little under US$ 20M short.
Unfortunately we cannot support good people with money donations just yet, but we’ve been doing our best to provide free Subscribe-O-Matic groups to numerous charity and educational organizations around Second Life along with other non-profit and community groups.
Relay for Life Second Life teams have been using Subscribe-O-Matic to coordinate the RFL effort every year to raise awareness and donations for the American Cancer Society. The Second Life RFL teams raised US$275,000 this year alone. We’ve also been supporting other efforts like Kivafriends.org, the Kiva.org lending community and the Amnesty International group in SL. Organizers of annual charity events and fairs like the Clothing Fair and Hair Fair have also been using Subscribe-O-Matic to plan and promote their events.
There are also hundreds of educational, art and culture communities using the non-profit Subscribe-O-Matic services: Art and Culture Virtual Community, ArtMuse, Institute for Cooperative Education and La Performance – to name just a few.
If you run a non-profit, educational, charity or community group in Second Life and want to use Subscribe-O-Matic to promote or communicate your cause, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be more than happy to review your group and set up an unlimited non-profit Subscribe-O-Matic account for you.
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We were just way too busy to write anything on the blog. Wait – we didn’t even have a blog!
Even though we’ve been quite busy in the last few months, we probably haven’t been updating you on our current website as much as we should. To remedy this, we put up this blog so we can keep you in the loop more easily, let you know what’s going on behind the scenes, what we’re planning and also post a handy tip or two.
Subscribe-O-Matic groups currently have almost 2 million members combined and over 100,000 members join every month, so even though we’re way overdue on some much needed feature additions and upgrades, we’ve been focusing on the backend to make sure we can deal with the growth and keep providing a reliable service.
Since we probably all agree our website urgently needs upgrading, we have a team of 150 engineers working on are working hard on a brand new Subscribeomatic.com website which will be much more user-centric. Users (group members) will be able to manage their subscriptions online without all the teleporting around and hunting for the kiosks. They’ll be able to unsubscribe easily on the website, or subscribe to new groups, check their recent messages or redeliver items they might have missed, amongst other things.
For group owners, the most important and long-awaited feature is definitely the ability to create and manage more than one group. Other exciting features include detailed analytics, the ability to send messages only to certain members (based on a tag or where / when they joined, etc) and 3rd-party integration options.
We’re aiming to launch the upgraded service and the new website by the end of February (provided we have enough coffee and Red Bull). In the meanwhile, we’ll keep you updated with previews and insights on what we’re doing.
Your feedback and ideas are very important, especially at this stage, so don’t be shy and let us know what features are most important to you in the comments below the post.
If you want to be updated on what we’re up to, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.
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