Opening Day Anomalies

Our experience with Opening Day has identified lots of interesting problems and brought some new questionst to the surface. Here's what we know so far:

1. Problems logging on: Don't forget that your username and password are CaSe SeNsItIvE. That seems to be the most frequent problem. Also, blank spaces and quotation marks are not allowed in your Simshost subscriber username.
   
   
2. Problems creating your user account: Turn on Javascript before you visit the account creation page. It has some error-checking routines that will help. Blank spaces and quotation marks are not allowed in your Simshost subscriber username; that seems to be a frequent problem with creating a new account.
   
   
3. Being charged for failed or canceled downloads: We're checking, but you're probably not being charged. When you download, your account status screen pops up showing the balance before and after the download, but the actual charge doesn't occur until the download is successful.
   
   
4. The strange white screen with the BACK button: That's showing up in sites that use frames and have a target specified in the link to a zip file. We're working on a fix for it. If the White Screen of Weirdness appears, check to see if the site is open in another window, and your account status is in yet another window. If so, you can just close the noisome windows.
   
   
5. Some sites are slower than others: Some web sites have hit counters, Java applets, large images, and other things that slow down delivery of the web pages and formatting them in your computer. There's nothing we can do about that; it's the individual webmaster's style. All the web sites are being delivered with exactly the same priority as this page.
   
   
6. Problems completing the PayPal transaction: This morning, PayPal was delivering a "clear" status flag instead "complete", even though the transaction was completed. We've fixed that one by programming around it.
   
   
7. Webmasters being charged for downloads from their own site: If you access your site via some URL that the SimsHost system doesn't recognize, it is charging you for the download. We'll fix that by resolving complete IP addresses instead of URL's. Don't worry, we'll tune up your subscriber account to reimburse you for any errors.
   
   
8. Want to use a credit card but can't stand waiting: FYI, PayPal accepts the same credit cards that we will be accepting -- Master Card, Visa, Discover, and American Express. It's a very convenient service so you might want to consider creating your own PayPal account. Click here to go there.
   
   If that doesn't work for you, take heart -- it should only be another week. We expect to have our credit card processing all set up and running around June 7.
   
   
9. Access from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Down Under without credit cards or PayPal or intercontinental paper mail: We're working all the possibilities, but we have a lot to learn about international banking. Our goal is to make SimsHost as convenient as we can without increasing your cost.
   
   
10. New webmasters waiting for a response: Not to worry! We're not ignoring you! We're answering the mail as fast as we can! Please note that you must be a SimsHost subscriber to have your site hosted on SimsHost. Also note that it costs us a pot of money to set up a new web space and rent an IP address, so we need to know that you're serious and understand that it takes quite a bit of time and effort to build and maintain a Sims site. You'll want to study up on basic HTML and practice a bit before embarking on this adventure.

Sic transit gloria mundi.