Help:About/archive/Current events

• 2010-02-21 To do: a rapidly-changing list right now, due to intensive work on the new code
• 2009-07-01 Work continuing but going even slower than before due to escalation of the aforementioned crisis.
  • Operations at vbz.net are very much behind due to an ongoing family crisis; I am continuing to process in-stock orders, but orders for anything not in stock may take some time due to technical issues. Please read here for more, and I apologize for the mess.
• 2009-04-11 : We're going phoneless, at least for now; see phoneless for why, and to add your comments.
• 2009-03-18 Much rebuilding of scripts behind the scenes, but work is going slowly due to ongoing family crisis. Successfully upgraded wiki software to MediaWiki 1.14 for better compatibility with administrative functions currently being written. I apologize for the main catalog pages being down; I'm doing some major reworking and due to very limited time I've gone with what gets the changes done the fastest rather than with what minimizes downtime. Hoping to have them back up in a day or two.
• 2007-11-18: data migration issues were preventing orders from being processed, but that has been fixed.
• 2007-07-15 While trying to implement transclusion of wiki content on the main store pages, I realized that VBZwiki's MediaWiki software was about 5 versions out of date (which was possibly making the transclusion difficult), so I upgraded it to 1.10.1.
• 2007-06-23 Keeping up with the spam as best I can while out of town; obviously I need to add management features to SpamFerret so I can block new spammers without having access to my main computer.
• 2007-06-14
  • Shipping department will be closed June 19-27, as we will be out of town. (Anyone in the SF Bay Area want me to bring them something from stock?)
  • Restored this page, which apparently got accidentally deleted (instead of reverted) after a wikispam attack on the 13th. Stupid spammers.
• 2006-04-22 I just noticed that Amazon seems to be embracing the wiki concept, or at least dipping a toe into it. If you visit any product page, there now seems to be a "ProductWiki" header, right underneath the "Customer Discussions beta" (apparently a forum-ish thing for discussing the product) which also seems to be new. I've been trying to implement both of these ideas for vbz.net for nearly a year now, but it has been slow going due to lack of time. It remains to be seen if Amazon will do it right and will continue to run with the idea.
• 2006-02-11: The MediaWiki software has now been upgraded to version 1.5.5, for a couple of reasons:
  • Spammers were getting on my nerves; I'm hoping that the spam blacklist will now work (as it does on the other wikis)...
  • Users may now receive email when watched pages are changed -- which provides a great way to have an opt-in mailing list with multiple topics :-) More on this soon...
• 2005-12-19: Searching by catalog number now works! Also I've just added all the Mountain longsleeves to the catalog, much belatedly; uploading them now.
• 2005-09-02: Hurricane Katrina
• 2005-08-10: A customer pointed out some Mountain shirts which were still being listed in child sizes only when in fact they are in adult sizes only. I had written a database query to find all child-size-only shirts, and checked each one it found, but it turns out (as I discovered when I checked into the particular shirt in question) that the query had a bug. Fixed the bug and about 10 more mis-entered shirts showed up. They have now been fixed.
• I've been buying up discontinued Mountain shirts in pre-paks as the budget permits -- one pre-pak every order or two -- and I noticed last night that the most recent one was listed in one place as "in stock" and in another as "unavailable". I've fixed that too.
• 2005-07-27: The 2005-07-11 Server Outage crisis would seem to be over, as the cart system is running again. Although I didn't get the new cart system running, I did get a lot of work done on it... and vbz.net now has its own SSL certificate!
• 2005-07-19: a catalog data entry goof -- apparently a lot of new Mountain shirts had been entered as available in youth sizes only, when in fact they are available in adult sizes only. I'm rebuilding that part of the catalog right now.

...and hey, we just got our first wiki spam! Someone at 69.50.191.168 posted a whole bunch of porno links here on the main page. Congratulations to this anonymous spammer, and hope that we never find out who you are.

• 2005-07-15: Most of the static pages are back up, as are the images, but the shopping cart still is not quite right and the checkout is not online at all; please see 2005-07-11 Server Outage for more information.
• 2005-07-12: Still working on getting vbz.net (the main store) back up and running. Uploading thousands of files is slow, even with cable, and a lot of the stuff has to be rebuilt. Plus (while other things upload) I'm also playing around with oscommerce, in the vain hope that I might be able to get it to be workable with the catalog data I have now, because that would be... so awesome, as they say. (Proper "live" order management, just to start with, and about a zillion other features.)
• 2005-07-05: I just now discovered that a lot of emails I've been sending have been bouncing, and I wasn't notified because my spam filters were filing them away out of sight. Just one more reason spam is evil (two more reasons, actually, as the bounces were also due to spam safeguards). Anyone who has emailed me recently and didn't get an answer, please try again. (Grrrrrr.)