All about Windows Live Messenger, providing news, reviews, support, and information for developing and improving your Messenger experience.
Fanatic Live is the latest version of msnfanatic.com, this shift aims to bring focus to the new Windows Live technologies, in particular Windows Live Messenger.
Please be patient while some last things are being finished, think of this site currently as a public beta, many things can and will change, such as the theme and graphics! Pages like About Us and Link to Us still need more work.
I am nearly done working on the major overhaul for the Web site. For the past couple of weeks I have been tying up some loose ends and fixing things here and there. If you have a good eye, you may have noticed some minor changes happing in preparation for this update, if you visit the forums, you can’t miss an obvious clue.
Now I am interested in feedback. As always, before I launch anything publicly I like to get as much feedback as possible. I want to show a few people the new Web site and hear what they have to say. It can be good or bad; I can try fixing the bad things and continue doing the good things. Just send off an email to info@fanatic.net.nz if you are interested and I will give you the URL and a password for access.
It would be especially helpful if I hear from anyone with Web design/development experience, such as getting feedback on the theme and usability from a technical stand point.
Earlier this morning there was intermitted outages, this was caused by TabServe’s users table being corrupt and queries to it were not releasing. As a result, Apache kept reaching its max clients limit and stopped accepting further requests until it restarted. The logs show it crashed possibly because it was being opened so frequently, because of one account being served so much. The account is owned by a Spanish Web site distributing skins patched to use TabServe and because customizing MSN Messenger in the Spanish market is so popular, ridiculous amounts of requests are sent to msgrconfig02.msnfanatic.com. This is the exact reason tabserve.msnfanatic.com and msgrconfig01.msnfanatic.com were dropped and it looks like msgrconfig02 may have to go soon, I wish people would read! Anyway, the data for that account is now served as a static page (the account not found TabServe msgrconfig error), so it’s not accessing the database at all.
Last week a secondary hard drive was added to the server to allow for MySQL and local backups. Back is run daily at 7AM GMT when the server is least busy. Visitors may experience problems when accessing any Web sites on the server during this time, usually for only the first 20-30 minutes. MySQL was moved to another hard drive to improve performance and is working much better than I expected. Along with a lot of optimization, things have been running smoother than ever.
Two months ago after upgrading the forum software to IPB 2.1, I made use of its new RSS features. One feature is being able to import RSS feeds into a specific forum, aptly named The Newsroom. It’s currently linked to 15 different RSS feeds from sites and blogs relating to MSN and Messenger. I lost the exact list I compiled, but I will add it to the forum information at the top when it’s next updated with new feeds.
The best bit is, there’s also an RSS feed export for this forum, so you can get news from various sites in one single spot and straight to your PC with an RSS reader. The URL to the feed is http://forums.msnfanatic.com/index.php?act=rssout&id=1.
I will also be using this feed for a single news page I’ve had planned for a while, where news from all the sites comes together into one page.
It was pointed out to me that msnfanatic.com/net/info variants of sub-domains are still linked to. A quick Google search shows there’s a fair amount, so I figured it’s worth making them active and redirect them to where they’re supposed to go. Newly active sub-domains are:
forums.msnfanatic.net
tabserve.msnfanatic.net
forums.msnfanatic.info
tabserve.msnfanatic.info
msnpiki.msnfanatic.net
blockchecker.msnfanatic.net
triople.msnfanatic.com
triople.msnfanatic.net
Ridiculous, isn’t it?
msnfanatic.net and msnfanatic.info were only temporary at the time, but there’s still a lot of sites linking to these domains. msnfanatic.com is the primary one.
