Bluff Avenue Blog
Updates and news from the Bluff Avenue trenches.
Bluff Avenue Blog
Updates and news from the Bluff Avenue trenches.
About this Group
- Name:
- Bluff Avenue Support
- Description:
- We're here to lend a helping hand and make your Bluff Avenue experience a pleasant one.
Read our blog to find out about the latest updates and features, and feel free to post to the Support forum or message us any questions, feedback, or bug reports.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/bluffave
Apparently due to coronavirus, we've hit the big time...or something. After a month of February where typically some double-digit number of games would get created in a day, in the last week, we've had 5 straight days of more than a thousand games created per day.
You folks must be bored at home!
Well, sadly, that "BETA" in the logo is no joke. We stopped active development on this site years ago, and that was before we made the thing scalable. So if enough games get created and don't get deleted, the server goes boom.
If the last few days is the new normal, we're going to have to get aggressive about cleaning up unused games, since they're sucking up precious server memory. Starting today, games that are older than 2 days and have never had anyone sit down at the table are subject to getting deleted. Scheduled tournaments that haven't started yet will get an exception.
Sorry about the inconvenience, but this site's for playin', not for setting up empty tables!
You may have noticed lag issues or other game flakiness with the site the last few weeks. It's been a mystery to us, as nothing in our server or network configuration has changed recently, and up till a few weeks ago the site had been running without a hitch for months.
I was starting to suspect it may be the sheer number of games created on the site in the last 6 years. So long as they were active and showing up in a group game lobby, they were loaded in memory. I counted almost 7000 games that were older than 6 months.
So our latest attempt to solve the site performance problems was to delete all games 6 months old or older. If that was indeed the problem, that should probably buy us another 5 years of runway before we run out of memory again. :)
I haven't logged into the site in a few weeks, and only today found out the game server's been on the fritz for weeks (judging from messages in my inbox and forum posts). Of course this coincided with the email system deciding to stop delivering message notifications, so of course all those messages people sent me about the server went unread. :\
Well, I rebooted the server, and things seem to be working now. Terribly sorry for the inconvenience!
Long time no post. :) I know most of you have probably figured this out, but just for the sake of new users, I wanted to clarify the current state of Bluff Avenue.
We created this site in 2009 as a way of playing an "online home game"--an experience that no existing online poker site offered at the time. It was as much for our own enjoyment as for the challenge of creating it, and for the possibility of making something bigger out of it.
The site was only funded out of my savings, so out of the need to pay bills and eat food, I got a job in November of 2009 and sadly left Bluff Ave to fend for itself. I haven't done any serious coding on the site since then, and maintenance has been limited to Dan and I occasionally restarting the game server when something gets horked.
So that's the current state of the site, and what I imagine is the future of the site. We'll keep it running, just because it seems like such a waste to take it down, but I don't anticipate any new feature development or bug fixes happening unless I win the lottery. :) Sorry about that.
We do read our messages though, so feel free to message us if something's wrong with the game server--we don't check in daily, so we won't know there's something wrong unless you let us know.
Until then, enjoy!
Usually, I just wait until it's late at night and nobody's on the site in order to do maintenance, but lately it seems like there's at least one game going on even late at night...So here's your advance warning!
We're coming down Sunday night (Monday morning) at 1:00 AM Pacific Time. The server seems laggy, I'm going to kick it a couple of times. Hopefully that doesn't break anything. :)
Thanks so much Kevin
With current corona lockdown...our game has to rely on online play.
Thanks again for still supporting us
Since plenty of people are now using this platform, maybe we can all donate a few dollars to at least keep things running for the coming weeks/months and reward your efforts.
Thanks again,
Thomas
Thank you for jumping back in. Our group will typically play once per week, any chance we can have the 2 day rule expand to 7. If it cuases performance issues we can deal with 2 days, as it is easy to create a new game.
Thanks a bunch,
-Jason
Also, not sure where you a currently hosting, however I beleive I have seen AWS is offereing free trials right now. In my opinion, I beleive you will easily be able to get sponsors / advertisers to help offset cost. I also beleive there are many that would be willing to make small contributions to help keep it up and running.
If there is anything myself or the rest of the Bluff Ave community can do to help, please don't hesitate to reach out!
Glad to see you are trying to clean this up! I have to appologize and admit that I am part of the problem. My weeekly in-person poker group is trying to to find an alternative during these times and BluffAve seems to be the only site that supports private cash games. We were testing it out yesterday, as I am sure many were. Lots of "test" games were probably opened in a short period of time, and if most were noobs like me, they accidentally got left open. The auto cleanup is a great idea. I think you have a good business opp here if you can stabilize it! My whole group thinks that this would be worth paying a small subscription fee for if it goes back into active development.
Thanks for the comments.
Jason: right now, the policy is to delete games only where nobody has *ever* sat down at the table, so if your tables have actually been used to play a game, they should be OK. This may need to change depending on how usage ramps up, but it's the policy for now.
Mikey: no worries. :) Enjoy the site.
Also something to note. Sometimes when the server is having issues the website loads, but we get 500 errors when trying to create games.
So about once an hour I try to create a game to see if it's working. Once I came back last night and I was able to create a game, I noticed that every single test game where I was getting the 500 error was then made. So our group had like 100 games in it.
So that may have caused an issue.
FWIW our group makes a new game everytime we play, so if games get auto-delete we don't care.
Thanks Kevin. Site is great. Let us know anyway we can help with the server issue.
Whatever you gotta do to keep those servers going during this quarantine, please go for it! I'm sure people would be happy to chip in a few bucks to help if needed. Also, check your Twitter handle if you haven't recently, i'm sure people are DMing offering help:).
Looks like a bit more lag, maybe limit games to like 2 per group or something extreme.
Life saver for our little poker group, anything we can do to assist let us know. We have resources available. Monitary wouldn't be an issue either, think you should capitialize off this and retire.
Can someone help me? None of the invites I have sent out to join my group have shown up in people's emails.
Christian- the email porition of the website is broken, and since they are dealing with more critical issues (aka site stability) they will probably not fix anytime soon or ever.
Just send people the URL manually to this site and to your group for them to sign up.
thanks Mike
Great app. Like the ability to play NLH and PLO in the same cash game.
Unfortunately, system is overwhelmed making the site unusable. :(
Yeah, Bob, it's true. This is way, way more traffic than the site has seen in the last 10 years. Unfortunately, scaling it up architecturally to meet that level of traffic not an easy thing.
Dan and I are trying to find the low hanging fruit (e.g. deleting unused tables, raising session limits in the load balancer), but to be honest, we may just be stuck if people keep flooding in.
Thanks man my buddies and I love this site. I would recommend just deleting all the tables that aren't used frequently. It's very easy to create new ones and the ones that are sitting will be gone.
@Kevin - Although we can now create tables the lag is so significant it makes play impossible. Let us know how we (the community) can help. Its a great tool to remain social with friends during this crazy time so I'm sure people would be more than happy to help figure out what it will take to make the site performant.
Close it to paying groups? We will pay you $50 to keep it running.
What about posting a github repositiory and we can host our own sites?
Seriously... you should consider asking for money. I'm sure people would pay for it, if its a reasonnable yearly fee. You could use the money for improving capacity. Or if you don't want to deal with customer service (unavoidable if it becomes a paid service), just ask for donations, and grant better server access to those who make a donation.
The site is great btw
Agreed. I know our group would contribute for annual access as well.
Let us know how we can help.
Thanks for the awesome site, my players and I would def be willing to donate if it'll help with the stability.
Hey all -
Happy I've found this site as trying to abide by "social distancing" is making it really tough for us poker GODS! ;) Hoping that this site works out for our home game as if so, I know we would all be happy to donate a few bucks to "the cause"!!!
Me and my gang would be happy to contribute as well.
I keep getting a channel disconnected error.
We'd defintely pay a reasonable game/year fee to help site operations.
Happy to contribue as well to keep this site going strong! Thanks for all your effort Kevin!
Is there anyone who know why it is not possible to send out invitations? I tried to ssend a few yesterday, but they never received them (not in spam either).
there are few options that are not working... I recomend you send link direct to your poker group and after that your friends will click on JOIN GROUP... it's much faster
I want to set up a FREE sit and go style tournament with my buddies (we'd settle up on venmo) but it won't let me choose $0.00 for the buy in, and when I do anything over $0, it says I don't have enough funds. How do I fix this problem?
It looks like the games in the main lobby are also broken, with all players sitting out and no action going. Might be a good time to delete those tables as well and free up some more server resources.
Kevin, thanks for clearing out those main lobby games. This morning the site was really fast. It might also help if the group tables have everyone sit out and stand up at the end of the session, so the table can close and free up server resources.
This is great, so glad I found it, but I can tell its still getting overwhelmed. I'd be happy to pitch in some money to help you guys out.
Can you post a paypal/venmo/ or something for us to donate to?
If you would set-up a gofundme or similar link, I would donate and I'm sure others would too! Thanks!
Just setting up our group now and I would DEFINITELY be willing to donate to this cause if you set-up a GoFundMe page!
Hi guys, newcomer here. So if I understood correctly, any newly created account (and therefore group) cannot actually create tables for the time being? Because once I create a Poker Game in a group, I don't see it listed.
Hi there
been searching for days since our lockdown in South Africa. Our poker school will be more than happy to donate some funds
Will be testing it tomorrow and thank you once again
Hey- this is great and definitely understand the game cleansing.
I love this concept and would be happy to donate as well to assist in keeping this up and running.
Agreeing with the above comments. Love the simplicity and have a small group that would use this on the weekly but keep getting server unavailable messages and game is lagging (on fast internet). Would consider donating if those issues could improve. Looking for something like with no luck.
Oh wow! Can I just start by saying a big THANK-YOU! This changed my life. With everything going on in the world at the moment I just want sure what to do... last Sunday I prayed to the lord jesus and I said "give me something to fill my time god, give me something to do!" the next morning I wake to a msg from Jesse (a brother in christ) and I'm playin poker like a pro! God bless ya! from a fellow follower and man of god!!!
I think that 9-player Dealer's Choice game in the Main Lobby was the culprit yesterday. I observed the full table and no one was sitting out, and no cards were being dealt. I think the table was waiting for a disconnected player to choose a game, and kept polling the table over and over, eating up server resources.
this site is great, is actually exactly what my friends and i are looking for in these crazy times.
unfortunately i think there is just too much traffic on the site, overloading the servers because as it stands the site is pretty unusable. let me know if we could be of help at all!
CAN I BUY A TO HAVE A TABLE NOT BE LAGGY AF?
same as all above - would be happy to donate to support! trying to create a game since days but no luck. please keep on it and create patreon or any crowdsourcing site account so we can donate!
I have found stuck tables in some of the public groups. The tables show players not sitting out, blinds posted, and no cards being dealt. There are probably hundreds of such tables, which is why the site is slowing down. The site probably needs an auto-cleanup routine to take care of stuck tables.