orry, people.

I decided to upgrade all the software packages, and I must have screwed it up somewhere. The machine went down and didn't come back up.

I had to restore a backup of yesterday. (we didn't lose much.)

I did manage to upgrade all the software packages now, though, so that's done.

High regards,

asswords are now encrypted using an SHA-512 hash, this is much more secure than the SHA-1 I used to use. (This only is regarding the game, not the wiki accounts.)

Also, a conversion was in place (it means that if you logged on in the game, your password would be converted.) for a couple of months now.

This means people can log on with their usual password, and not notice anything.

A problem might occur for people who have not played the game in several months, as their password was not converted.

Deputies can assist now in password resets.

High regards,

ust installed a new version of the mmud. Now the previous version had all sorts of goodies, but the version I just installed is purely of a technical nature.

I changed the way players are determined by the system as "playing" or "not playing". As this is rather an essential part of the game, I hope I did everything correctly.

It also means that, if I did not, you might also see non-playing players during the game. Kindly let me know when and where this happens, so I can fix it.

High regards,

Hello everyone!

I will be short and to the point. The deputy team now have a way where you can contact all of us with one email. You may have noticed on the main page, there is now a 'Contact Us' section listing the email. Whatever you send to that address will be forwarded to each deputy.

We encourage those of you with problems, questions, or even ideas or suggestions to contact us this way so that we can discuss your email and get back to you.

We only ask that you give us at least three days to respond so that we can all discuss whatever you send and get back with you as a team. :)

Also, if you are having trouble logging into the game, please send us an email about it, as we would like to look into the matter. Thanks. :)

The address is deputiesofkarchan@outlook.com. And again, it can be located on the main page under the login section.

Thanks for reading

 do not know how many of you are using the secure encrypted version of the website available at https://www.karchan.org, but if you do, you must have noticed that the certificate has been expired for the past 3 months of so.

I have now remedied the problem, and the certificate is now valid until the first of February 2018.

You can view/verify the certificate, by clicking on the GoDaddy badge you see on the left.

High Regards,

inux needed an update, badly, and I had to install the new kernel version.

That's the reason for the small amount of downtime, just now.

I restarted everything, and everything seems to be in order.

As always, let me know if anything is amiss.

High regards,

 erry Christmas and a Happy Newyears to all of you.

As usual, I find myself with little time to spend here. Let us hope this changes in the coming year. I will make that my primary New Year's Resolution.

All the love,

 have recently received questions wether Karchan is secure, depending on behaviour that people see in their browsers. Well, truth of the matter is of course that I can never be 100% certain.

I do try very hard to increase the level of security of the game at every opportunity. It already has been strengthened considerably since the days of Drupal.

That said, I felt the need to write a permanent page and add it to the website, to detail how you can play the game in relative safety.

You can find the page here and it is also accessible from the Help menu. Choose Security.

High regards,

ell, I did mention that I would put up a blog post indicating the recent changes.

For those who have not noticed, logging into the game has changed.

The new process is as follows:

1. log on
2. enter game
3. play game
4. quit game
5. log off

I am very happy with the change. No longer is the security part something that I cooked up myself, but instead we're using the Glassfish security realms.

It is no longer required to play the game, when you log on. But once you have logged on, playing the game is as simple as the press of a button.

Also, as you now see there is some content in the "Settings" page. This page will be expanded with the possibility to edit your charactersheet and/or guild etc. So, though it seems very empty for now, this will change.

A small but important note on security

I use SHA-1 hash to encrypt passwords. I've decided to move over to SHA-512 hash as being more secure. As I don't know peoples passwords, I've rigged the software to re-encrypt the password when somebody logs in.

It does mean that it is very important for you to logon at least once with each one of your characters.

Once the change becomes permanent, your characters with the old encrypted passwords will become inaccessible without deputy intervention.

Regards,

aintenance is now done. Let me know if I screwed up somewhere along the way.

I will write a blog about the changes, though they should be fairly obvious and unambiguous, but I'll add some backstory about why.

Also, chances are that if things do not work, you might want to refresh the page, or reload the page, or clear your browser cache, or some of that jazz.

Seriously, clear your browser cache.

Regards,