News Before 18 November 2002

November 16, 2002 News: For your amusement: The total web space used by all the SimsHosted sites combined adds up to 10.32 gigabytes as of tonight. With today's updates, the amount of material on the sites grew by 63.46 megabytes; that's about the size of two or three average Sims sites.

November 8, 2002 News: Another new site, just getting started on SimsHost! Koralute Sims opens today with a collection of beautiful faces for your sims!

November 5, 2002 News: We are happy to announce that Simmie Chic is back from the bandwidth blues, and she opens today right here on SimsHost.

October 31, 2002 News: Happy Halloween! Today we have two fledgling sites to drop into your trick-or-treat bucket: Gimmie Sim and Zoo Simz! Both sites are just getting started, but they both already have some nifty stuff to enhance your game.

October 25, 2002 News: We're getting behind in deploying new sites because there are so many of them, but we did have a change in the list of hosted sites. Elegant Sim Fashions and Sue's Sims have moved to another server, hoping to be able to pay their hosting costs with à la carte shopping. We wish the best of luck to Tracey and Sue!

October 15, 2002 News: The SimsHost Autumn Memories Treasure Hunt starts today!

October 12, 2002 News: Here's something special for Columbus Day! How do you feel about stunning architecture, dramatically presented on an outstanding web site? Not sure? Then hasten to Sims R.E. 101, where you will find lots of houses for lots of lots! It opens today on SimsHost!

October 9, 2002 News: Helena's Sim Site returns with her stunning collection of walls and those special paintings to satisfy your sweet tooth!

October 8, 2002 News: Shylo's grandma makes wonderful things for her, and now she wants to share her wonderful things with you, at Shylo's Attic Dream, the 44th site to open on SimsHost!

October 4, 2002 News: We know that you will enjoy this! Yuppie Sims opened today, with no pop-up ads and no bandwidth blues, here on SimsHost!

September 29, 2002 News: Now that you have all those new neighborhoods filled with houses, you will want to populate them with some of the most beautiful characters available for the The Sims. May we humbly suggest Old Skins by Daboo and Ana? They have updated all of their old skins and created a whole new site where you can enjoy all of their earlier work, which we have the honor of hosting on SimsHost!

Housekeeping: An uncanny glitch in the database engine lead to several subscribers' download balances being reported at zero last week. No data were lost, however, and all the affected accounts were corrected yesterday. We do apologize for the inconvenience this caused to those who were bitten by this bug.

September 26, 2002 More News: You'll want to get some more neighborhoods ready, because this evening award-winning S and M Builders opened their doors for you at their new location, here on SimsHost!

September 26, 2002 News: Today we proudly annouce the opening our 40th hosted site! You will enjoy a little bit of everything Debby Sims!

September 13, 2002 News: Travel in time with your sims to romantic eras when quality and craftsmanship ruled the construction industry! You will surely enjoy the stunning architecture presented by Historic Sim Houses, which opened last night on SimsHost!

September 6, 2002 News, the Late Edition: Take a walk Down the Garden Path with LadyLarke! Many sections of her new site are ready for you to enjoy, today! Right here on SimsHost!

(And yup, we're still working on some more sites!)

September 6, 2002 News: Last night we shattered all our previous records for the time it takes to get a site on line! Sue's Sims is here, and you're going to love her work!

Here's the story from behind the scenes: At about 6:30 PM PDT, Tracey (Elegant Sim Fashions) mentioned to Greg that her sister Sue's web host was down, and asked how long it would take to get her up and running on SimsHost. Greg replied with notes about how to set up an account and fill out the data sheet for the site. At 7:12 PM, Greg received Sue's site data. At 7:33 PM, Greg had the web space deployed and sent a note to Sue with all the instructions. (An incredible 21 minutes turn-around time!) Then, less than 3 hours later at 10:21 PM, Sue wrote back to tell Greg that the site is on line and ready to be added to the directory!

(If I had stayed up another 10 minutes to get that note, we would have had this announcement for you last night; but alas, contrary to rumor, I do have to sleep once in a while. --Greg)

September 2, 2002 News: What's that howling in the distance? It seems to be coming from CallistaWolf's Sim Lair! Get ready do some howling of your own when you see this wonderful new site that opened today on SimsHost, bringing the total to three dozen great sites! And yes, there are still more being built!

We had some difficulty with the system last night and had to turn off the part that handles new subscriptions for a while. If you paid for a new account last night, please use the "Maintain your account" link and check it to make sure the charges are OK. If there are any problems, let us know a subscriber-support@simshost.com, and we'll get it fixed. Thanks! And please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.

August 28, 2002 News: Carrot Stuff is back with new stuff and a new layout! Once again you can rock to the Carrot Bop! Right here at SimsHost!

Carrot Stuff brings us to a total of 34 active sites. We'll save you some arithmetic: If all 34 sites were to follow the model of independent subscription sites charging $5 a month, it would cost you $2040 a year to subscribe to them all; but you can support all these sites for just $24 a year plus whatever bandwidth you use! For some even better news -- we still have more sites being built!

August 20, 2002 News: Get ready to party and start building those walls, because Sims Festival opened today on SimsHost with a wonderful collection of artwork for you!

Amusing statistic: As of today, the SimsHosted web sites occupy 6.6 gigabytes of disk space.

August 17, 2002 News: Sleepy Hollow Sims has reopened in grand style and in plenty of time to get your sims ready for Halloween, here on SimsHost, of course!

In other community news: From all of us at SimsHost, congratulations to our good friends at SimsAddicted upon reaching your second anniversary of terrific service to the Sims community! (SimsAddicted is an egroup on Yahoo. For more information about Sims groups on Yahoo, see page 16 of the Moon Sims links.)

August 15, 2002 News: Job Two Sims is back, all in one place, with everything on line! All those wonderful building projects are right here on SimsHost!

August 14, 2002 News: There are a few little nits to work out, but that won't stop us from proudly announcing that SimSalon reopened today on SimsHost! And there are still several more sites a-building! You're gonna love this!

August 7, 2002 News: We have the pleasure of welcoming Kimbarlou Sims to SimsHost!

August 1, 2002 News: To commemorate the beginning of SimsHost's third fantastic month of bringing you the largest and best Sims site in the world, we are pleased to announce the start of the Great SimsHost Treasure Hunt! We couldn't be any more proud of the many, many artists and webmasters who pooled their efforts to bring this to you! Enjoy!

Late edition news: We are honored to announce that a new site, Sim SpiriT, is ready for your enjoyment! Two more sites are still building, too! What a wonderful way to celebrate the beginning of the third great month of Simshost!

July 21, 2002 News: We have added a feature that provides for subscribers-only and adults-ony access to specific areas of the SimsHosted web sites. This seems to be working for almost everybody, but there are a few instances where the adults-only access seems to be awry.

If you are over 18 and cannot access the adults-only areas, please first check to make sure that your year of birth is entered correctly in your account information. To do that, click on the link to "Maintain Your Account" in the menu to the left. Then scroll down and click on "Edit my account information". The year should be entered as four digits. Example: 1964.

Right now we have to update the adults-only list manually, so it might take 24 hours before you have access. We're working on a tool to automate updating the adults list in real time.

If your year of birth looks correct but you still can't access the adults-only areas, please let us know by writing to subscriber-support@simshost.com. Include your SimsHost subscriber name in your note, and tell us which site you're having problems with. Thanks!

July 1, 2002 News: Questions about the relationship between Moon Sims and SimHost keep coming up, so decided to add that the FAQ.

I'll answer a very frequently asked question right here: No, we don't plan to move SimGoddesses to SimsHost. Don't need to; don't want to; it ain't broke so we ain't gonna fix it.

But yes, if you want to support SimGoddesses the best way to do it is to subscribe to SimsHost. See the Subscriber FAQ for more explanations of that.

June 28, 2002 News: Oops! Abstract Sims changed its name to ArtSIMz because we discovered that another site named Abstract Sims came line just last month!

June 23, 2002 News: We are honored to announce that Abstract Sims came on line today as a SimsHosted site!

June 16, 2002 News: CanAm Sims is open for visitors! Enjoy! Also today we turned on the link to the Subscriber FAQ. If you have more questions, we'll see you on the EZBoard!

June 10, 2002 News: New subscriptions now include $2.00 in your download account. We've also credited all existing subscriptions with an additional $2.00 in your download account.

Some subscribers are encountering a white screen while downloading. We are working on that problem, and have added a web page about the strange white screen. If you are experiencing download problems, please do read that page.

June 8, 2002 News: We are now accepting all major credit cards! We've also added a link that will verify our Thawte certificate so you can check up on our commitment to your security.

Five more sites are currently being built, and there will be more to come! All the webmasters have been busy during the past week! You might want to check out the site update announcements on the SimsHost EZBoard and the individual sites' forums to learn about all the updates! Enjoy!

June 4, 2002 News: Some folks are still having difficulties with the Account Status window, so we turned it off while we scratch our heads some more. So, until we get this figured out, you will not receive an instanteous report on the status of your download account. You can still check your account by clicking on Maintain Your Account on any of the SimsHost pages.

June 3, 2002 News: Cure for download problems: Close that little "account status" window. We're working on a permanent fix, but if you remember to close the account status window before each new download, that should solve most of the download problems.

KILLERSIMS requires its own work-around: access the site by its IP address, not its domain name. The link in the table of sites above takes you to KILLERSIMS via its IP address. We can fix this more elegantly, too, but need to wait until Jerry gets back from vacation.

June 2, 2002 News: Username glitch: In some circumstances our system was truncating usernames to 20 characters. So if you have a long username that stopped working, try chopping it off at exactly 20 characters when you log in. You may have to restart your web browser to make it forget the old username.

We changed the system to allow up to 50 characters in your username, but that won't fix the ones the machine dutifully truncated. Oops. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

June 1, 2002 News: Of course there are some glitches that we didn't discover in all our testing. Where would we be without Murphy?

All the glitches we know of so far stem from errors and anomalies that we didn't anticipate, so the system doesn't have ways of handling them gracefully. We're working on them right now.

The most common problems are caused by the fact that usernames and passwords are CaSe SeNsItIvE. So be careful if you use that pesky shift key when you create your username or password.

Also note that blank spaces and quotation marks are not allowed in usernames.

Turn on Javascript before visiting the Subscribe Online page. That page has some routines to help you check things. It also has some routines that help communication with PayPal.

See our hastily written page on Opening Day Anomalies for more amusements and bug fixes.