Outage at improved-initiative.com (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

I wanted to give you a heads up that we're experiencing an outage at the official website address improved-initiative.com. This happened because I mistakenly let the domain lapse. Amateur mistake! My sincere apology if this affects your game.

In the meantime, you can access the app at https://improved-initiative.herokuapp.com/ and you can log in with Patreon in order to access your Account Sync data there. Unfortunately if you have data that was only in local storage it's stuck until I can get the official domain back up.

I'm hoping to have the problem solved this weekend, but it may need to wait until business hours next week. Thanks for your patience!

Update 1/31

Good news and bad news. TL;DR I'll likely be able to recover the domain, but it may take up to another week. In the meantime please continue to use the backup URL:

https://improved-initiative.herokuapp.com/

Here's a rundown of what's happened so far, if you're curious.

On January 16th, I received a Renewal Notice from Azure letting me know that my domain was up for renewal. I get this email every year before the domain auto-renews, which has never required action on my part.

On January 26th, I received an Expiration Notice informing me that my domain expired on the 22nd. This was a surprise, and it's likely because a payment instrument failed, but I didn't get any notification about that.

I immediately logged into Azure to try to correct the problem. The domain no longer appeared in my account, but it was also listed as unavailable for purchase.

After this I engaged Azure customer support. They got back to me today to let me know that they have to "hard delete" the domain, and I can repurchase it once that process is complete.

Root Cause Analysis: How do we prevent this from happening again?

1. After I have recovered the domain, I'll switch domain registrars to a company with a better grace period.

2. When I receive a domain renewal notice, I'll verify that the payment instruments are up to date. This is a manual step so it's not an ideal remediation, but it's a best effort.

Again, I'm really sorry if this has affected your game. It's nice to see how many folks have come to rely on my software at their table, but it's certainly a double-edged sword!

Take care!