Well, yeah ok, that too. ,)

More than likely Bouitaz you will see the Arcade mod after the upgrade. I just wanted people to step forward and let me know they use it 🙂 I will look to add new games before the upgrade when I get the time to search for them. If you have a list of the games that do not work please post them so I can remove them.

I don't have the bandwidth to try all of them out so I depend on the community to let me know when stuff in the arcade needs fixing 🙂

I believe Rock Face Rescue is the only one that doesn't work;

arcade.php?mode=play&g=23

Did a bit of spring cleaning last night in the forums and moved some attachment pics from the forums to the gallery and relinked. If people spot any bogus posts or posts you think should be moved just let me know.

Took car of it 🙂

More than likely unless something comes up between now and this coming weekend. I will probably be doing the site update then since it will be a long weekend for me here in the states (Memorial Weekend - Remember the troops). I am hoping that it should only take a few hours, but you never know with these things. Moving a database that is several releases old to something new always seems to have some issues.

Here is the tentative schedule for it all:

- Friday: Disable user registration and lock the forums (about 9-10pm) this will stay this way until I think everything is working. I have to install something during this process after the database is migrated over and all new files are FTP'd to the server.

- Sat: Mainly testing and last min tweaks and I hope to have the site running by the evening. So basically a 24hr downtime. So I hope you can survive until I have it all running 🙂

I have been trying to do the small things to help speed the process up but there is still a lot to do once I re-upload everything. If all goes well everything should look generally the same but there will be a few new things and all the programs and scripts have been updated to their latest versions. I have done so much custom stuff to the site that its hard tracking it all down.

Going to enable gzip on the server and see if that helps with page load times. Google is complaining that some of the pages take up to 3 sec to load and they recommend I turn it on. Your damned if you do and damned if you don't because when you enable it the server has to extract the contents to display it anyway so I guess i'll try it and see how it goes for a month.

So if anyone notices a degrade in the performance just let me know.

Update 11/1:

Been a little while since I have done a official update of what has been tweaked and added, so here it is:

- Updated the gallery to the official release version, now running 3.0. I will look into personalizing it a bit more when I get time and there is a phpbb bridge that is being worked on that could tie into your site login credentials (stability will be the issue with this bridge).

- Tweaked the Knowledge Base to have the layout look correct, had some alignment issues.

- Fixed the issue by adding a mod to fix issue of the style getting messed up when linking in a large img using the bbcode IMG tag. Still the favored method is using the HSIMG tag.

- Added a post ranking system to the forum area (request from Geraldine)

- Updated the links and about pages.

[/hr]

Things that I will be working on... and hopefully implement by the end of the year.

- New store link layout and maybe with some help get some designs for some actual SSC merchandise 🙂 Some free stuff could be given to the members that their art is picked.

- Add at least 20 games to the KB

- Customize the gallery (if possible) to look like the rest of SSC.

Anything people want to have fixed or have some ideas please post them and I will see what I can do.

Thanks Darkone! 🙂

Also nice list of other updates too 😉

The anti-bot question during registration for these forums is bizarre and difficult to use. It asks a question like "What planet in our solar system has rings?" Three of the options are correct (Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune), but adding them in the order they exist in our system doesn't satisfy the question. Same with the question "Which Star Wars films starred Mark Hamill?" If you add episode 4, 5 and 6 to the box in that order, it's still wrong? Then of course it locks you out for a period of time because you missed the questions too many times.

Just wanted to bring this up, because I doubt I'm the only one that got frustrated with it.

Thanks BaggerX for the feedback on this.

It is probably because the mod isn't intelligent enough to know you have the right answers but just in different order. Hmm, because I have to put in the answers and I think it is only accepting the default order I had them in. Maybe i will refine all the questions to only one answer to solve this issue. You are the first person to bring this to my attention so thanks and I will look into fixing it with adding/refining the questions.

Have to admit, I don't get any spam at all with all the measures I take 🙂

If anyone has a question and answer they want to see in the registration form just let me know. It should be space/scifi specific.

Fixed it BaggerX

Replaced those two questions with:

In what movie SW movie did Obi Wan die in?

Which Apollo mission put humans on the moon?

All questions I believe have one answer now so that should fix the registration question problem.

😀

I could not answer either of those questions, DarkOne!

What's wrong with captcha? (And not the impossible-to-read kind.)

(PS: I think obi-wan died somewhere between Episodes 6 and 1, but I wouldn't swear to it.)

I had captcha for a while and noticed a lot of spammers signing up and it was a task to keep them in check. There is captcha reading tools out there for automating this task. I do the registration this way, so I know your not a bot and that most of these questions are really easy to the scifi gamer. C'mon you didn't know Obi Wan died in Episode 4 or that Apollo 11 mission put humans on the moon 🙂

I can gladly make it easier I just need some questions and answers thrown my way and i will gladly add more or remove the hard ones.

But I have to admit since putting in the sortable captcha I have had no spam at all. But I am open minded about other alternatives.

How would I know which of the Apollo missions made it to the moon? There were quite a few, and a couple of them did not work out so well, as I recall. The mission numbers would be quite difficult to sort out, without looking them up. Oh, and they all happened before I was born. 😉

I had to look up Obi-Wan to be sure... He died in 2000, which was after the release of Episode One. However, he appeared in all six episodes, due to odd twists in the space-time continuum.

OK, so there was that scene in Episode Four where Darth Vader vaporized Obi-Wan, but that did not slow him down much. 🙂

It's a question that does not have a single, clear, answer (even if you look it up). That's all I meant. Like the question about the number of planets with rings. 🙂

You might as well ask Princess Leia's favorite card game. Or the number of planets in our solar system. Or the name of the nearest star. 😉

And, by the way, Star Wars questions tend to screen out anyone under the age of 40. Is that really your goal?

I understand the problem, but I think you are trying too hard. There are a wide variety of knowledges and experiences here, so it might be difficult to ask any one question that everyone could answer. To be fair, you would probably have to ask several questions, and allow a miss or two, which makes for a complex quiz.

simple maths equation written as words ie

ten plus twenty = thirty or 30

I can definitely add some of those too, currently I have a pool of 7 questions and wanted to have a few more to have a nice collection of questions.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Having to open another tab and Google for an answer is kinda silly really. Something much simpler would be nice. I could see the bots learning to do word math, but you could make those a little more verbose. You could even keep the Star Wars theme if you like:

Example: "Eight jawas are salvaging a T-16. Three of them get picked off by sand people. How many jawas escape?"

Something like that anyway 🙂

I removed some of the harder questions and replaced them with some simple math questions there is 7 questions total in the pool and they are randomly selected upon user registration.

Update 12/23:

- Removed twitter update mod because it is now broken because of twitter api change

- Removed some database entries for some mods no longer installed

- Updated the chat mod on the site to the latest version

- Updated the about page

- Updated the links page

Update 12/26:

- Combined both Jumpgate forums into one forum

- Created a new forum for Eden.

- Updated the download mod on the site to the latest version

- Updated the about page

Update 3/19:

- Website has moved hosts and there has been a casualty of this move and this was the download area. It looks like it isn't salvageable at all. I will be trying to put it back together and with the help from any members we can get it back to where it was again.

- Some of the benefits of moving the site to a new provider are: unlimited bandwidth, larger database limits, more file storage, backups and hopefully better speed for people.

TO DO LIST:

- Create a ftp file area for people to upload files to help with rebuilding of the download database

- Get wiki linked into main page (might still keep it locked from editing for now)

- Get gallery running on latest version (seems to be issues with Godaddy hosting I might need to resolve)

- Create new videos page (old one wasn't cutting it)

- Add country flag mod to site

- Rebuild download area setup

- Update links page to reflect wiki changes

- Update about page to reflect changes to site

I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem but I am having a hard time getting into SSC, seem to be getting a general error message a lot or the pages just time out. It might just be my lousy broad band, but so far the only site it happening with is SSC. If it any help It stared happening over the weekend and it seems to be getting slower and slower.

Yep, same thing here, its like back in the early 90s with my rubbish 56k modem 😆 I am sure Darkone is busy behind the scenes sorting things. I am sure it wont be long before all is back to normal. It does show you though how much we would miss this place if anything happened to it 😉

Working on it right now. I noticed and even more slow down when I made some edits that GoDaddy suggested to make everything php5 compliant. All of the memory values and upload values are increased and functionality and responsiveness seems to have gotten worse. I noticed some errors yesterday while loading posts that the database timed out a few times and I think that is the biggest issue mainly because the majority of the info on SSC is in a database.

I am hoping they can solve my issues soon because it is frustrating enough that the move didn't go smoothly and to then have some responsive and database errors makes it worse. Especially since the db hasn't changed at all when switching hosts.

I removed the chat window from the forum view because for some reason it didn't like the switch to php5 settings. I will uninstall the mod and reinstall it fresh tonight when I get home.