Hello, kittens. FM here, waving at you all from the darkest corners of her theater's green room.

As many of you have noticed, it's been a little glitchy here in Nine Lives-land lately. Emails not getting delivered, notifications not showing up, stories not posting for fully validated authors - all kinds of things. Well, while we work behind the scenes to get things fixed up, let me take a few minutes to explain what's going on.

First: Emails and notifications. Now, this requires some backstory. A couple of weeks ago, we were hit with our first spammer account, which left a whole bunch of annoying spam reviews on people's stories. FM and meeshie took care of it pretty quickly once it was spotted, got the account and spam deleted, the IP blocked and we figured we were all done and dusted. However, what happens when someone leaves a review? An email gets sent out to the author notifying them of a new review. The content of the spambots reviews meant all those emails were marked as spam, something we didn't really think about until complaints started rolling in a few days ago about how people aren't getting their email notifications for story updates, reviews or PMs.

What we've realized is that everyone who is having a problem getting email notifications of these things has one common factor: you all have Hotmail/Outlook email addresses. After some digging, we've discovered that, thanks to our friendly spambot reviewer, Microsoft (who owns Hotmail/Outlook) has marked Nine Lives as a spam server and is blocking all our emails to their users. We're working to have it corrected, but we could use a little help from our members who use Hotmail/Outlook. Please mark ninelives@ninelivesarchive.com and admin@ninelivesarchive.com as safe email addresses in your contacts. The more of you who mark us as safe users, the faster we can get Microsoft to reverse their ban on our notifications. Again, this only applies to those with Hotmail/Outlook email addresses (although really, everyone should mark those emails just so we don't accidentally end up in your spam folder). In the meantime, your email messages and notifications might be delayed a while, or possibly lost, until the issue with Microsoft is resolved. We know it sucks but there isn't much we can do about that one until Microsoft decides we aren't evil spammers out to take over the world.

First time for everything, right? Ahhh, site growing pains. 

Speaking of growing pains, that brings me to the second group of glitches: everything else (PMs not being delivered right away, stories not posting, site slow to load, etc). We have grown a lot since The Move. We've actually grown so fast that we've already maximized the available bandwidth from our server package on our new host (which was equal to what we were using before piggybacking on Elysian Fields). In short, everything is running slowly because there are so many of us now enjoying our wonderful Caryl sanctuary! While we love y'all, it's gotten crowded in here much quicker than we anticipated. The only way to fix this problem is to upgrade the server package on our host, which is happening today. So we should be running much more smoothly by tomorrow at the latest once the purchase goes through for more space and bandwidth.

I know its a lot, and there is a lot going on this week with getting our Team Write challenge moving. We really appreciate everyone's patience while we work to get everything sorted. Please, show my wonderful, patient, amazing co-admins Ikkleosu, subversivegrrl and especially meeshie some love for all their hard work behind the scenes this week! 

Thanks everyone,

-Fairies Masquerade