That's weird.

Strange indeed. My street soccer User Tournement,

LCL Golden ♔ Final, (link),

should have started yesterday, Monday 28th. But it didn't.

What happened? The "SYSTEM" has a bug? Or it has to be done manually, and Richard simply forgot to?

And now, should i change the starting date?

Cheers.

The timing daemon died. You should send a message to Richard about it.

"Time daemon"? Sorry, I don't understand. Is it a joke or what?!

A program that is supposed to be running all the time and spend most of its time waiting for some event to happen is called for historical reasons a "daemon". Commonly a web server is a daemon, waiting for an incoming connection from a browser. LittleGolem also depends on a time daemon, which is supposed to start user tournaments at their appointed times, end the current Game of Empathy and start a new one, notice that there are five players for a Monthly Cup and start a MC tournament, and other things.

Unfortunately, the LG time daemon sometimes crashes, and when that happens all the things it is supposed to do go undone until Richard (I presume) restarts it and fixes whatever caused it to crash.

Many of the things the LG daemon does could be done without a daemon, e.g. starting a new Game of Empathy or a new MC tournament, but that would require reprogramming by Richard, and I don't blame him if he has focused his attention elsewhere.

"Cron job" is another name for "time daemon", less poetic.

Ok, Marley, thanks for excellent explanation. So, we'll just have to wait.

In Unix/Linux/Mac OS X, a "cron job" is a program that a user requests to be started by the cron daemon (typically named "crond") on a schedule that the user provides. Each user allowed to use cron can have her own set of cron jobs and each job has its own hourly/daily/weekly/monthly schedule of when it is to be run. The cron daemon spends its time waiting until it's time to start the next scheduled user cron job.

If LG used a set of separate cron jobs to start GoE, look for fifth MC signups, etc., then when one of those cron jobs crashed, it wouldn't affect the others. But at LG when one of the daemon's functions stops happening, they all stop, which is evidence that it's a daemon rather than a set of scheduled cron jobs.

and to go one step further: 'cron' is the acronym of 'Command Run On Time'.

OK, it's fixed now. The Final begins; good luck all!