Downtime recovery announcement (Patreon)

We’re back!

We thought we’d exiled the Evil Bureaucrat who multiplied a load of the evil team’s votes. But then the next night the Assassin woke up and decided to attack our Shopify account. Well, after a couple of nights with no more deaths it’s time to get you back to your games.

What happened
On Friday, when we tried to delete the app accounts which were created to manipulate the World Cup results, we were shocked to see Shopify ignore the filter we had in place and instead start to delete nearly all of our customer accounts. As a result, users’ authentication details were removed from our system and players were unable to log in.
Shopify have confirmed that our filter was in place when we started deleting accounts, and despite us following up over the weekend, have not identified a problem with the filter or been able to tell us why user records outside of that filter were deleted. We’re still trying to resolve these outstanding questions, and we’re planning to share more technical details about this when Shopify have told us more.
Although we have backups of our own database, including usernames/pronouns, app preferences, Patreon account details, game stats and voting history, Shopify have told us that even their own “internal teams are unable to recover deleted customers once they are removed” which leaves us in a strange, half-broken state.

What we’re doing about it
So, to get people back to playing Clocktower as quick as we can, we’ve come up with the following process to get you all linked up to your old accounts:

• Some users will still have active accounts, for example if you have made a physical purchase at bloodontheclocktower.com or for a few other reasons. First, try to log in with your existing details: if you can, amazing! You can continue using the app as normal.

• If your login fails with the old account details, click on “Register” and create a new BotC Online account using the SAME EMAIL ADDRESS as your previous account. You can use either the same password or a different one, but the email address has to match.

• When you log in with this new account, we will merge it with your old account. You’ll have to re-verify your email address to complete this step. At this point, you should have full access to your account with everything you had customised before. (except for any previously uploaded custom avatar)

• If you previously had to verify your phone number at the point we added phone verification, you may be asked to go through that process again. You can use the same number that you used previously, to verify your account again.

• Some people are finding they're lucky enough to still be logged into the app. If so - you will probably still have to register a new account the next time you log in, so you may as well get a headstart and do it while you remember

Although this is the first major outage the app has had in almost three years, we understand how frustrating it was for users, especially those who organise games in advance. So we’re looking at ways we can make it up to people who have a paid subscription that they weren’t able to use this weekend. More details on that coming soon.

Please hold a little longer while we work out how the final World Cup matches will be rescheduled. Even better: go and play some of the scripts!