It's Alive

Hi guys

First of all, we want to say a huge thank you to all of you for sticking with us during this difficult time. We’re really sorry for all the delay – the last few months have been a nightmare. We had several problems that were combining to cause all of the site crashes.

Firstly, Hollow Art had become so big that we were at 100% disk usage on our previous server, with no way to escape our hosting contract and unaffordable fees to rent more disk space from them. We were also being hit by thousands of spam attempts in a day, which were slowing the site down to unusable levels, plus filling up what little disk space we had with crap.

We’ve now upgraded to new hardware (with different people) that has plenty of space – enough that we’re looking forward to the next 1,000,000 icons being posted!

In an effort to curb the spammers, we’ve also made some changes. The one that you will notice the most is that comments on sets can now only be made through Facebook accounts. We appreciate that many of you like to keep your gaming and real lives separate and thus having to use your Facebook to comment isn’t ideal, but we need to do this to keep the site up and running. We thought about this long and hard and hopefully you will agree that this is a small price to pay. You will not, however, have to use Facebook to request sets. We’re going to be keeping set requests largely the same as they were before. Because of this, we still have some work to do there so, for now, you still can’t request sets. Hopefully that will be coming in the next few weeks.

You can, however, go ahead and post content once again. You can open new accounts again. You can send us your RPG adverts again.

The other big change you will see is if you’ve been hotlinking from the site. Prior to now, we’ve never said anything either way about hotlinking. We’ve never specifically allowed it, but we’ve never asked you not to either.
From now on, you won’t be able to hotlink individual icons from Hollow Art, sorry. That does slow the site down and whilst we don’t think that hotlinking formed a huge part of the trouble we have been having, every little helps.
Those of you who had been previously hotlinking from Hollow Art may have found that, over the last few days, your links stopped working. That is not an error. We’ve changed the root of all our icons, so those links no longer work. If you hotlink again in future, you are likely to only see a ‘hotlinked from Hollow Art’ icon instead of your icon. Please find a hosting site to upload your icons before use. Thank you for your understanding and help to keep our site up and free to use for everyone.

As with any new system, there will be a period of changeover where you may experience bugs, gremlins, and monsters. If you do find any, please let us know and we will hunt them down and fix them.

The Hollow Art Team