Scheduled Downtime: 8/8/23 11pm GMT-4 for 4 hours

Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to)

A game about writing nice letters to real people. Write and receive encouraging letters in a cozy room. Trade stickers and listen to chill music. We're all in this together. Sometimes all you need are a few kind words.

[h2][h1]Short version: [/h1][/h2] Gotta turn off Kind Words for a few hours to update the server. Also, there's a small, fun update to the game coming soon. [h2][h1]Long version:[/h1][/h2] If you've been following along with our folksy little updates all these years, you may be familiar with this theme: We didn't expect Kind Words to be popular and I didn't design the server thinking lots of people would actually use it. That caused some growing pains for all of us. A few [i]years[/i] ago I started rewriting the server for better performance and extensibility. I don't want to jinx it, but I've [i]actually tested[/i] the new server for high loads unlike when we launched the current one. It's going to take a few hours to do the upgrade because our database is around 7 gigabytes in size and I don't want to lose any of your messages. So first I'm gonna backup the existing database, which takes about a half hour. Then I need to convert the database to my totally redesigned format. That should take about an hour. Let's assume something will go wrong, double that and add a little and I'm estimating 4 hours. Boy do I hope nothing goes wrong. The best thing about this server update is that it will let us do some new things with the game. And I know that everyone longs to open steam to be greeted by a monologue about server upgrades, so to thank you for your attention, I'm going to reward you with a tease for our next game update: we're adding a "favorites" system so you can curate your own little collection of the kindest of words.