Draft issues 03/08/2026

Ottoneu Updates
1

Server having some issues. I’m looking

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Disconnected from auction draft
2

I think the server just came back in a really big way, but I’m figuring out what could have happened to cause this. Will update.

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3

Still pretty slow to connect to the server. I am testing if it is because of our AI bot protection stuff.

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4

Hi Niv, do you have any updates on an ETA? I have league members in 834 asking as we have all been disconnected.

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Same here for league 760. We’ll give it a bit more time and then rescheudle the draft. How does tha twork? Will the draft just STOP and allow us to pick back up?

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We’re testing some solutions here. If you have to pause and come back, whatever you’ve done so far will be (and already is) saved, so you can just pick up where you have to stop. I hope to have a good answer soon.

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7

Thanks Niv.

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8

Is there a limit to how long we can pause the draft? Our league has a bunch of east coasters and they would rather just try next week than stay up late.

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my league is also having issues still

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This is still an issue. I’m continuing to investigate. I’m sorry I don’t have a better anwer. I’ve literally never seen this before.

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11

Same here league 912.

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Same League 176.

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If we cannot get started in the next 10 minutes, can you please wipe clean the few results we have so we can schedule another day? It’s already 10pm EST.

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This is truly a nightmare, and I apologize. If you need any special help, please email help@ottoneu.com

To remove any draft results, just go to your commish tools, and you can remove players there. Remove ensures there’s no cap penalty.

I’m circling around an answer here.

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15

Drafts are coming back but the response time is still not where it was earlier today or yesterday. I’m continuing to investigate.

16

Performance is coming back. Still not where I want it to be. But, I think one could draft now.

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17

There was a confluence of events tonight:

  • A SSL cert expired silently, which was causing some clients to not be able to connect to the draft server.
  • This in turn caused CloudFlare, which we put in place last summer to reduce AI-bot scraping that was causing the site to suffer performance-wise, to think there was a problem with the draft site, and redirected traffic for some people.
  • We turned off CloudFlare since we noticed this issue first, and this caused the AI bots to come scampering back, slowing down most of the site to a crawl.
  • I then recognized the cert issue and renewed those, but the deluge in traffic overwhelmed our draft server and it refused to accept new connections
  • We finally put CloudFlare back on and reset some more transient stuff like Draft Chat while I poked around to figure out what was slowing down the response time of the draft server. With testing, we saw the draft server start to take on more connections and respond increasingly faster.

With CloudFlare up, I am less likely to notice what I think was the core issue here: a SSL certificate not autorenewing for many days in a row. The SSL cert is now renewed for a few months, and so this should not affect this draft season any more. If this is actually what the root issue was, we should be good through the rest of this draft season. I of course will be monitoring as best I can, ensuring that draft performance returns to the excellent place it was just yesterday.

I said this in Slack and I’ll say it here: I really, really appreciate everyone’s understanding. I am doing my best to make the draft room better and better, but drafts are really tricky, performance and connection intensive things, and the smallest stuff can cause really rough cascading effects. I am really grateful that you guys were patient and understanding as I went through this issue with a big assist from David over at FanGraphs. Thank you all for being cool when these issues arise, and I’ll continue to do my best to prevent them and fix them ASAP when they do come up.

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18

There is no limit to how long a draft can be paused.

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I appreciate the transparency, and thanks for the update. Better for this to happen on March 8th rather than March 22nd, I guess - right? Most leagues still have plenty of time to figure out a plan B

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20

Yeah I hope so. And anyone who needs to figure out something else because of the issues last night, please email me

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