TigerTails Radio

So, a little later than originally planned, it looks like things are gearing up for Season 12 to begin. Later than planned as the PC that usually broadcast the show was being argumentative and refusing to edit videos properly. That’s now sorted, so expect the rest of the post-gunge interview videos to be released in the next couple of weeks.

There has been a minor move of studio furniture to give a better viewing angle of TK during the show. Not quite as drastic as we’d hoped (we need a bigger studio) but certainly one that’ll work for now. No new equipment was required, but some cables have been replaced as they’d failed during the off-season – and will probably continue to fail during the season.

There will be some new things though, including graphics for the show. This includes a new banner for the YouTube channel, new thumbnails, and even a new title card. These are raring to go. There might be some new jingles too, because why not? Not only that, but there are some explorations into getting some new games to play on the show, not just Jackbox ones. Though Quiplash, Split The Room, Guesspionage, and Trivia Murder Party are certainly going to make a comeback due to their popularity with the cast. Also, there may well be some Done and Dusted reviews from a new regular contributor, but more on that nearer the time.

Finally, there may well be some changes to the show’s length and start time. Originally the show ran for 3 hours every single night of the week. This became 2 hours for Season 3 onwards, and the time has gone from 11pm start time to an 8pm start time. This is because A) we’re getting too old for long shows, and B) work commitments have affected the show timings. It’s looking like the latter reason may be coming into play again, and so at the moment TigerTails Radio Season 12 will start at 8.30pm and run until 10pm. This could change between this post and the start of the season, but for now the run time will be 30 minutes shorter. So we will be losing the Gaming News segment. We can’t promise Xavier won’t sneak something into the regular news though, for those who will miss that segment.

So when will Season 12 be starting? With any luck it’ll be going through the first test shows in early September. Watch this space, or our Twitter feed for further announcements. Until then, keep an eye on the YouTube page for new videos coming soon.

For those missing Episodes 9 and 10, we’ve had some difficulty with the music on these videos, so once editing is finished we can work on getting them uploaded.

Watch this space, especially for Episode 11, coming tonight at 8pm UK time!

So after entirely too long, TigerTails Radio is back where it belongs on the .co.uk domain. www.tigertailsradio.co.uk is BACK!

So what happened? Well, for a long time, the TigerTails Radio domain was hosted by a company called Just-The-Name. They were a cheap yet well featured registrar who had powerful URL masking and good customer service. They allowed you to point your domain at anywhere on the Internet so while the site was hosted on simbaspaws.org it would never have been known. Then Just-The-Name was purchased by Plusnet. Now, I’m not suggesting that Plusnet are a bunch of useless cowboy hacks and the company should be avoided at all costs but alarm bells rang out loud and clear in August 2016 when, after renewing the domain, the domain forwarding broke. So I raised a support ticket and was pointed to an off-site status page which revealed the forwarding had been broken since late 2015. There was some back and forth which resulted in my following message to them:

“Having also had a look at the site status page, I am attempting the fix suggested in July to see if it’ll have any impact. I’m not holding out much hope, but I’m trying it. I would also very much like to know what exactly your technical people have been doing since November 2015 to fix the issue. I know technical difficulties can be hard to fix, but this has been going on for the best part of a year now. Occasional “still investigating” messages just don’t cut it. What exactly has been investigated? Why has it taken 8 months to reach a fix that has a low success chance, and why on month 9 are “investigations” still taking place? I’ve been with you guys since 2002 (ironically for the one domain that’s still working properly) and things have never previously been as bad as this. What happened? And, while on that chain of thought, perhaps someone in your marketing/management team would like to confirm why web forwarding is still an offered service, when the site status page seems to indicate that this is something you can no longer provide. At the very least a big warning message when I was renewing, warning me that web forwarding was experiencing technical issues and the ETA for its remedy would be somewhere between soon and the eventual consummation of our planet by the sun – that would have been appreciated. Things had been working okay before then, so there was certainly no need to check the site status page (or, indeed, to even notice it existed). And when you consider I use Just The Name primarily for the web forwarding service, this has been an unexpected, unwelcome, and unhelpful occurrence.”

I eventually spoke to our web host, as they also offered domain hosting, and they assisted in fixing the issue. Because they’re useful and not a bunch of useless, clueless, morons.

Then came the news that Just-The-Name was closing. The end was due to happen near the end of Season 10, but there was time to get the domains transferred away to another registrar. Or at least there would have been, had Plusnet actually responded to ANY of the transfer requests sent. So when the company finally closed, the DNS tables reverted to default and promptly stopped working. Helpful. In the lead up to the closure, it was well advertised that the domains that weren’t transferred away would be moved to Easy’s Internet services and an extra year of registration would be applied. This came as a surprise to Easy’s support, who knew nothing of this when I tried to get control of the domains back from them. It turned out that they weren’t the company that took the domains over. So all the TigerTails domains were now lost in the void of the Internet.

Thankfully, Echo works in the field of online things and was able to inform me that Nominet had an online portal which could be used to get control back. So began the task of getting things fixed. Nominet were able to confirm who had the domains and provide contact details. However firm wanted too many forms of personal document that I was never going to be providing to a company I’d never heard of, so I used the tools provided by Nominet to use them to wrestle control of my domains back for me. While this was going on I was also firing off many support tickets to our web host to prepare them to receive the domains. Finally, Nominet finished the task and I could now work with them to transfer the domains to their new home. Thankfully that wasn’t needed as within hours of requesting the transfer it had been completed. A quick DNS refresh later and boom – TigerTails Radio and TigerTails Gaming are back online at their .co.uk domains.

So what next? Well, we finish rebuilding the studio to start with. There’s still a little piece of horrifically expensive equipment to purchase which will happen in late March, so by Mid-April we should be ready to bring TigerTails Radio Season 11 to the air. So long as nothing else breaks.

And I can’t promise that nothing else will break.

Site updates have been a little lax while TK recovers from giving birth to a kidney stone and taking much medication to counteract the side-effects having one puts upon the body. With Hedgie now at Uni and unable to continue being the site updater, TK will get episodes 49 and 50 up on the site as soon as he can after Episode 51.

Both episodes are available on YouTube on the TigerTails Radio YouTube Channel, links on the right hand side of the screen in the Social section.

It has come to this. Many nights and days of moving and sorting, reorganising and faff, all culminating in the ability to start the test shows for Season 10. So at 8pm GMT on Monday 21st November, TigerTails Radio Season 10 will return for the first night of testing. The first thing we will be testing is the YouTube Content ID system, as we have located 10 tracks which are all real songs but currently licensed to be played in videos worldwide. We will not be using all 10 (probably), but they’re there if we want them. We are looking to add more music into the format of the show, though, to break up the long spells of waffle. Music will be provided using a mixture of CDs and vinyl as we have the record player back in commission, with Creative Commons things coming from the laptop as per Season 9. This means that while music can still be submitted via the Submit page, you can now also email in any commercial song requests, and so long as YouTube will allow us to play it then we should be able to comply. That’s the theory, anyway.

Amendments on how the studio is wired are currently preventing games of Quiplash from working, but we’re looking for a workaround on that.

In happier news, there is a Discord server up and running for the show. Look on the right and you’ll probably see the widget which will allow you into the channel if you’re a Discord user. If not, we still have the YouTube comments and IRC as places you can chat. Those with a microphone and decent connection, however, may get the chance to join us live on the show if using Discord as it should be relatively easy to get people on air. There will still be the IRC channel running too for those who want to be there, as well as the YouTube chat thing – which we will try to monitor this season. Does this mean we’ll bring back things like 20 questions and Blankety Blank? Don’t know, we’ll see.

So, join us at 8pm GMT for Episode 00 of TigerTails Radio Season 10 – the first test show. Hopefully we won’t need to go to 00.5, but watch this space. Come chat in the Discord server or in IRC, and we hope you enjoy the show.

And now a message from our poor overworked web admin, Thomas King:

We’re back online! Well, technically the site never went offline but more on that below. At least the most problematic technical difficulty the site has had recently had the decency to wait until after the season had ended before kicking off.

Upon renewing the domain as it was about to expire, TigerTails Radio fell foul of an issue that had been with our domain registrars for quite some time. The pointers that they used to get the .co.uk address pointing to the website were no longer pointing. So they site would still be up and running, but no one could get to it via the .co.uk address. Naturally, as an efficient and helpful registrar company, they gave fair warning when renewing the domain… Oh no, wait. No they didn’t. The issue was kept hidden on a tiny Site Status link on their homepage (which you bypass when going straight to your domain login panel) and wouldn’t manifest until work on the domain had taken place. In this case, the renewal was the trigger. This was on top of them taking so long to process the renewal in the first place that I had entered talks with Nominet to ensure the domain wouldn’t get taken by a squatter.

An angry email conversation ensued whereupon I was eventually put through to someone either more competent or more important who informed me that I would have to seek assistance from the web hosts, and the registrar was unwilling to release further information about the fault. While I won’t name them, I will say that since Plusnet took them over a while ago, their customer service had gone downhill. The email exchange resulted in the sending of “At the very least a big warning message when I was renewing, warning me […] the ETA for its remedy would be somewhere between soon and the eventual consummation of our planet by the sun […] would have been appreciated” before assistance was given by someone a little more helpful. Shocking customer service. By the time I got a useful answer out of them, TigerTails Radio had been unreachable by the .co.uk address for 18 days.

The same can not be said for our website hosting company, who have been fantastic throughout. After a couple of days going through the various potential solutions and waiting for the DNS to update, I finally opened a support ticket and was given clear instructions on exactly what I needed to do, once I had explained what had happened and what I’d been experimenting with. The result is, after 22 days, TigerTails Radio has a working .co.uk again. For how long? Hard to say, but it seems to be stable for the time being.

So, with a massive thank you to the team at GBServers, it’s now business at TigerTails Radio as the studio is reformatted ready for Season 10. Testing shows for which are currently scheduled to begin in mid-November. Watch this space, or keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter pages for updates.

With NaNoWriMo done and dusted, things can start to get back to normal here on the TigerTails Radio website. The archives of previous shows will be updated with the full details where possible and full listings of any songs used shall be added.

This should happen all around the normal show schedule of 8pm UK time every Monday evening, so don’t think that the website getting all lax means the show isn’t still on. The show must go on, but the admin of the website was sidelined as TK prefers writing over updating websites…

The lazy sod.

Season 9 testing begins today at 8pm UK time (BST currently). As said in previous posts, this is not a normal show and viewers of the YouTube feed will have to be kind to us as the stream might not be as stable as we’d like. If all goes well though, there will be a 1080p stream running at 50fps (YouTube allowing). There will be some testing to get the audio synced (or indeed, working) and we’re not going to promise we’re not as rusty as all Hell. Should be fun. Keep up with the show in IRC (#tigertailsradio on the anthrochat.net server) to know what’s going on if you’re only watching via the YouTube feed. TK will post what he’s doing in there.

If you fancy sending music to us, there is now a Submit a Song section on the main menu. This gives you all you need to know about getting music to us, and what we require in order to play it (without attracting lawsuits). Give it a read, and get sending those songs.

Finally, if you want to be kept updated whenever we update the site, our RSS feed is up and working (for a change) so feel free to add the RSS feed to your favourite RSS readers to be kept up to date with all the latest information on this site. Also don’t forget our Facebook and Twitter feeds (links on the right) for other info and posts throughout the week. There might even be an update made for tonight’s show… Though I wouldn’t put money on it.