Board blanked out after clicking on a city.

[mHabes]

I clicked on a city to move the boat, and when the page refreshed all of the game pieces were missing. All that was displayed was a blank board. Clicking the refresh from db link corrected the problem.

[mHabes]

It just happened again when clicking on a resupply pile, and the following error was displayed:

Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in <b>/web/htdocs/www.mabiweb.com/home/modules/GM_Hansa/functions.php</b> on line <b>557</b>

Also, I had to view the page source to get the error, as it was obstructed by the game board.

[MaBi]

Aargghhh!
Is this game #119 "KMCL Test" (kmcl, mHabes, mschacht)?
I don't know what happened but this game is broken now: its 'game-position record' in the DB is almost empty and so can't be recovered.
Did you notice anything else unusual? Did you try something strange, like kmcl was suggesting in the messages? Was the site particularly slow at the moment?
I'm sorry, I will try to investigate the cause, but the game is lost beyond recover now :(

[mHabes]

No, I just clicked the supply pile, and the board went blank. Then I clicked refresh from db and the ship appeared in the upper left corner; the game was dead, and I recieved the error message

It all happened pretty quickly, so I don't think it was a timeout of any sort.

[MaBi]

Well, I haven't been able to identify the origin of the problem. During the refill action something messed up badly the in-memory game position and then this flawed position was immediately saved into the DB, because the refill action doesn't allow take-backs and it saves the new status without asking for confirmation.
I have found, and fixed, a small bug in the 'refill' code, which could occurr in some rare conditions near the end of the game, but I'm sure it was not this the cause of the problem (I've tried and it produced a much less dramatic effect, just a normal error message).

Maybe it was just a fluke on the server. I have already noticed some problems (http and mysql unavailability) which I'm sure are related to the hosting server. If this happens with just a dozen of players, I'm afraid I will have to move soon to something more robust (the site is currently on a very cheap hosting service). By the way, I'm not an expert in this: if anyone has some suggestion about a good hosting service, I would be glad to hear them...