Notice: Clearing Character Badge Data

[Sekoia]

On Thursday, February 24 at approximately 12 noon ET, all character badge data will be wiped from the database. Verified and unverified badge data will all vanish and badge totals will be reset to 0. However, all other character information will be preserved. I will post a follow-up notice once the maintenance is complete and it is safe to re-verify badge data.

After the release of Going Rogue, CIT suffered from a number of bugs that led to inappropriately verified badge information. Despite our best efforts to clear as much of the invalid data from our systems as we could, we undoubtedly have missed some. More recently, Titan Sentinel also had an unexpected manifest problem that contributed additional invalid verification data. We've worked hard to fix the problems that caused these situations. A clean slate will allow our users to re-verify their badges and have confidence that the information on the site is once again valid.

We're also taking this opportunity to make some architectural changes to the part of the database that stores character badge data. These changes should improve the performance of that table, contributing to a more responsive site.

We sincerely apologize for this necessary inconvenience. Please bear with us as we continue to make CIT better.

[Sailboat]

Heh.  I posted elsewhere about this "extra un-earned badges" problem and, once I got the chance, found that imply deleting the character from CIT and using the /info_self command in-game fixed everything.  I was going to go through my characters, examine them for extra badges, and delete the offenders...but I see you'll be doing it for me.    Cool.

[eabrace]

The biggest difference is that by doing it this way (wiping only badges and retaining the character records), there will be no impact to anyone using information in other locations that is based on character ID (CIT avatars and signatures, links to character profiles, data feeds, etc.)

[BattlerockX]

So will that mean that the previously "unverified" badges will be able to be "verified"?  Or is that the next thing to fix?

[GuyPerfect]

Badge verification requires badges to be formally detected in the game by Titan Sentinel. Checking off which badges you have in CIT manually won't result in "verified" badges.

We should probably make that distinction clear somewhere, huh?

[El Furioso]

The biggest difference is that by doing it this way (wiping only badges and retaining the character records), there will be no impact to anyone using information in other locations that is based on character ID (CIT avatars and signatures, links to character profiles, data feeds, etc.)

It's good to know we won't have to go back in and re-upload all our character mugshots or worry about links in signatures.

[Sekoia]

This maintenance is complete. It is now safe to verify your badges again.

The changes ended up requiring a few minutes (less than 5) of unanticipated/unannounced webserver downtime, for which I apologize.

Certain parts of the CIT site (such as spotlights, recently tracked, leaderboards, etc.) may remain out of date until we get enough badge verification back in the database. I expect they'll all be back to normal by tomorrow.

Thanks again for your patience during this maintenance!

[Bloodletter]

I want to personally thank you for doing this.  Thank you for inserting integrity back into the database.

[Sekoia]

I split off the support discussion regarding problems verifying through Sentinel to a separate thread:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,3825.0.html

[Sekoia]

Unfortunately, I missed a case where auto-verification was still happening on account-level badges, and we didn't detect it in testing. Fortunately, this only affects two badges: Agent of Order/Chaos and Agent of Praetoria.

To maintain the integrity of our database, Agent of Order/Chaos and Agent of Praetoria have been deleted from all characters. A total of 1245 characters had one of the badges removed. To the players of each of those 1245 characters, I apologize for this inconvenience.

[Turgenev]

Heya:

I've noticed that my main badger's reverification with CIT seems to not impact the Leaderboard. I re-verified via Sentinel on Friday evening for Freedom Server / Dr. Turgenev (profile is http://cit.cohtitan.com/character/13743). He shows on the profile as properly verified, but two days later and he doesn't appear on the leaderboards.

I've noticed some other "usual" names not showing either, like Lothic or Caliburst. Any news on this front? No rush, but it's odd that it actually shows on the profile as verified, but on the Leaderboard it's not on the radar. It DOES update every four hours, doesn't it?...

[Sekoia]

Thanks for reporting that, Turgenev. There was a small bug that I just fixed. The leaderboards are now updating again. (And yep, it's supposed to update every four hours.)

[Turgenev]

Verified. Thanks for the speedy fix, Sekoia.