[IMPORTANT] Plugin Updates - License Free - Please rebuild your apps

General (non-technical) Testing Forum for Moderators / Admins
#1

EDIT: Thanks to @dfoxinator, our license server is back up and running. Thanks @dfoxinator!

Hello everyone, just echoing the post we made on twitter and on our blog in case people didn’t see it: http://gremlininteractive.com/?p=1109

 

Our licensing server (for our no longer supported Corona plugins) is to be shut down on the 25th of November 2014. We are also closing our doors and are no longer trading as a company, as of the 21st of October 2014.

As we said in our previous post, (here: http://gremlininteractive.com/?p=1106 ) please update your apps if you haven’t already to ensure no interruption in service (to your plugins).

Thank you

Hello fellow developers. First and foremost, we would like to offer our most sincere apologies for any inconvenience our license server down-time caused. It happened suddenly because of our host, it was out of our control, and we had no prior warning.

Summary:
After careful consideration, we have decided that our development of plugins will be discontinued. We appreciate your support and your suggestions for additional plugins, but at this time we cannot devote development time toward this venture.

As a result, we have decided to open-source our plugins and remove the licensing restriction  that our plugins previously had. Our plugins no longer contain any license code, they do not talk to our server, and they now only fire a “fake” valid event to maintain backward compatibility within your code.

The source code and documentation for our plugins, are available from our Github page

Documentation for these plugins has moved off-site and is now available on Github. Links to the documentation below:

Chartboost Plugin Docs

PayPal Plugin Docs

Kiip Plugin Docs

Existing customers:

If you’re using the Chartboost , Kiip , or PayPal plugins, we recommend that you rebuild your projects  and take advantage of the new versions which no longer use our licensing servers. This is not a requirement, but we suggest that you do so.

New customers:
Our plugins can now be used by anyone with an appropriate Corona subscription level. Our plugins no longer require a license key.

Support:
To reiterate what is said in the plugin source code on Github, we can no longer support these plugins (including the source code) in any way. We have brought them as far as possible, and open-sourcing keeps them alive.

Conclusion:

Once again, we apologize for the downtime and any inconvenience it caused. We hoped that this venture would be both more profitable and more helpful to the community, but it did not meet our expectations. We regret that we must discontinue our development of further plugins, but we hope that you can continue to use the existing plugins and benefit from them.

Sincerely,

Gremlin Interactive

#2

“May the code be with you”  :smiley:

#3

Wait, so is the licensing server still up right now? It’s understandable that you don’t want to support the plugins anymore, but that shouldn’t mean apps that use the plugins in the wild will stop working immediately… I might just be misunderstanding though. Please clarify this point, thanks.

#4

Edit: please see the first post for an update on the situation.

#5

Really sad to hear that! 

But first things first - Plugins for pps which are live in the store  won’t work?  That is bad news… 

We just need to rebuild our apps now, that’s it?  

#6

Edit: See first post for an update.

#7

How many requests are you being hit with?

I’m a web developer and specialize in scaling and I’d be happy to help you find a usable solution for the next week.

Why can’t you just put up a static page that says every license request is valid?

#8

Over a million requests daily.

The static page isn’t the issue, that’s what we can do. It’s the amount of traffic hitting apache. Our new server can’t handle it. Neither could our old one. I’m all ears for putting our a temp fix however.

Edit: please see first post for an update.

#9

OK, that’s a lot but not absurd. Is your Apache config optimized to the server specs? You can also try Nginx (http://nginx.org/en/) which is a more efficient alternative to Apache, but I’d try that last.

The most important thing is using a completely static page that’s getting hit (no serverside language (PHP or whatever) and no database).

Also, which can probably solve the issue completely, use a CDN. Cloudflare offers enough service to fix this for free, I believe. https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn, and more specifically, you would need to do this (you should be able to cache PHP too): https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172256-How-do-I-cache-static-HTML-

#10

Not a bad idea. The catch, is that the page it hits has to return something or the plugin won’t get the response it expects. In the case of the (latest chartboost release, prior to this announcement) chartboost plugin, it requires a simple “1” (minus quotes) response, or in earlier builds of the chartboost plugin or the paypal and kiip plugins, it requires a json response.

So the blank page idea won’t cut it I don’t believe.

#11

That’s perfect. My idea doesn’t require a blank page. The page just has to be static, meaning it can always return the same value. Just make a completely static page with the contents 1… If the server still can’t handle it (I think it should really be able to though), then put Cloudflare in front of it, and then it can definitely handle it because your server will no longer be doing work.

#12

Ah i see where you are going with this now. Might be a temp fix after all then. Nice. 

I have sent you a PM.

#13

If I am not mistaken, AWS S3 has already some geo-cache stuff inside of it, if you will be uploading just a static page with a default response (like a json), you can simply upload it to S3, activate the static page feature and let AWS handle your requests.

As said by @dfoxinator, you can also add cloudflare as a CDN, but in this case, I am pretty sure that S3 has some kind of CDN on it.

#14

Thanks to @dfoxinator, our license server is back up and running. Thanks again @dfoxinator!

He is da man :slight_smile:
 

#15

So if the server goes down again, will my live apps in the App Store and Play Store crash? I’m only using your Chartboost plugin, and I’m fine if no Chartboost ads show, but I don’t want my apps crashing until I submit an update. So just to be sure: if your server is down, will my apps crash at launch?

#16

Not at all. They will not crash regardless.

The server is nice and stable right now, so i think we are good

I would still advise on rebuilding. That way you needn’t worry about it.

#17

The github URL you posted has an extra space character at the end, just so you know.

#18

Thanks, fixed :slight_smile:

#19

Thanks Danny, we appreciate your honestly, support and all your hard work.

#20

I am sorry to see it end this way. I had told people asking for lower prices, more liberal usage policies that it would end this way. They just had to kick it and kick it until the whole deal made no more sense to Gremlin and its partners… A sad day for us all indeed.