Subscribe-O-Matic Blog

Subscribe-O-Matic and new rate throttle on llGiveInventory

Some of you might have stumbled upon JIRA ticket SVC-7631 or have been given a notecard describing how this unannounced Second Life server change might potentially break your mailing list or subscription management product or service or even cause all your vendors to get blocked in a certain region and stop giving out inventory items for a period of time. I have been closely monitoring this issue for the past few days and testing the current versions of Subscribe-O-Matic against this upcoming throttling change and I would like to write a few words about it.

Subscribe-O-Matic unavailability details

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?

Scheduled Maintenance: March 7th, 2010

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.

Subscribe-O-Matic Member Discount Vendor

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.

Non-profit, charity and educational Subscribe-O-Matic groups

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.

No, we didn’t kick the bucket

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.