Email Outage Caused Some Accounts to be Locked Out

[Fraize]

Hi everybody,

Mea culpa here. On Friday I was trying to fix an issue where badges were being awarded improperly. When I fixed the error, I ran a batch-job that recalculates everybody's badges and sends emails to everybody with any new badges assigned.

Our old Websleuths user accounts, some which haven't been logged in since 2009, were being awarded badges and emails were sent out informing them of those new badges. Many of those emails are now defunct, so our email server was hammered by bounces (email address undeliverable).

This resulted in our email server shutting down, so our regular emails started to fail, too.

We've got a setting that requires your email address to be valid, so if we receive a few of these bounces, we mark your account as invalid, so some of you may have been trying to log in and been told you have to validate your email address. That email asking for validation would never come...

I wanted to let you know I've found the problem and am resolving it. I've removed your account restrictions, and disabled the valid-email requirement for now. Once our email server comes back online, I'll turn that setting back on, but for now any accounts that were invalidated should be valid again.

Any new users attempting to register will experience the same issue. No email validation requests will arrive in your inbox until I can get the email server back up and running.

My sincere apologies for the issue! I'll have it resolved as soon as I can.

 

[Fraize]

Email has been reactivated. If anybody sees any unusual behavior, please raise an alert to me by DMing me!