Up, up and awaaay!

Posted by Db0 on August 9th, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , .

Hail Wesnothian! If this is your first visit you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Enjoy!

The fora are back (in black) at the time of writing and. It seems that they have moved servers while the originals were dead.

As our benevolent admins have posted.

In the crash right before the move some data was lost. We had to restore and old backup of the database. Due to this is all new forum accounts, forum posts and probably the attachments from the last two month were lost in the crash. Forum avatars have to be reuploaded since some problems with those occurred, too. The good news is that this is probably everything that was lost.

So if you can’t login or anything, now you know why.

Gogogogo!


Oh-oh

Posted by Db0 on August 7th, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , , .

I get the impression that the wesnoth servers are doing a Yo-Yo impersonation. They’re down again (or, more accurately, simply displaying a blank webpage).


Fora

Posted by Db0 on August 6th, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , .

Something’s going on with the fora. I can feel it in me bones!

…and also on the fact that I’m getting a white page instead of the classic “experiencing technical difficulties” message ;)

UPDATE: The basic forum system seems to be up (with an interesting message “breaking stuff”). I’m guessing that they are now restoring the database.


Wiki Up

Posted by Db0 on August 5th, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , .

Just thought I’d let y’all know that the wiki seems to be (partially) up. At the moment of writing the “Play” section is loading (along with support & project) but the “Create” part is still reporting database problems. However you can still access WML documentation so I’m not certain why only that link is failing.

The Fora are, unfortunately, still down.

UPDATE: “Create” is working as well. Just clear your cache.


Artwork Development through the Gallery

Posted by Db0 on August 4th, 2008 filed in Artwork, Ideas and tagged as , .

Since the recent server meltdown there has been no place for people to continue working on artwork and this is likely to continue while the servers are being restored to working order. The official news seem to imply that it may take a while more for things to get back to normal.

To this end, I thought I’d propose an alternative solution. The Gallery.

Currently the Journals and the Gallery are setup in such a way so as to allow people to easily register and have their own personal space to post their artwork. Every new user registering gets automatically their own album in which they can upload as many images as they like, including videos or other media files.

The gallery also supports many other functions like commenting, ratings, RSS, tagging etc, which can greatly enhance the content. A Quick example is the Art of Wesnoth, which is a custom tag I’ve created to showcase some of the best content that already exists.

How can this help in development? Well, first of all, you can use it, while the fora are down ;)

However I think that this is more powerful than the fora. In the gallery, artwork designers have their own public sandbox where each piece of art acts like a different thread without clutteting (as would happen in the forum). This way the discussion can move from “thread” to “thread” fluidly and more organised. You can see a short example I did here. (Please disregard “content” of the example).

Furthermore, because by uploading to the gallery you have automatic classification, there is no more reason for bots or hacks in order to somehow grab the artwork before it is lost (as is what was required with the graphic library). Uploaders can tag their art as soon as they put it up which will then make it searchable. Edits from other devs will not be confused with actual artwork. People can subscribe to their favorite artist through RSS to get immediate updates and then collaborate etc.

As a last small bonus, anyone can use the artwork in the gallery for a  blogpot.

Generally, I feel that there’s a lot of potential in using the gallery software for this. Here is an opportunity to see if it is as useful for you, as I think, while allowing you to continue with your contributions. I can only hope that people like it enough to consider taking it on officially as part of the wesnoth project.

Give it a go and see what you think. You’ve got nothing to lose.


Official News

Posted by Db0 on August 4th, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , .

It seems we have some official news on the Homepage. Apparently progress is being made and access should be available to the multiplayer servers again.

Full quote follows:

As you might have noticed we are currently enduring some problems with our main server. That is: about one week ago we had a major harddrive failure resulting in the system not working at all. So far we don’t know exactly how much of the data on the system is completely lost since we are working on restoring things. So far the multiplayer servers (stable and development) are back up again and the subdomain redirects like gettext.wesnoth.org are working again. What is not working so far are the forums and the wiki. The problem is that parts of the database seem to be broken. Currently cycholka is trying to fix and restore whatever is possible. Some stuff is completely lost like the screenshots folder we were using including the ancient screenshots. If anyone of you has a backup of those, feel free to contact us. We don’t know how many of the forum attachments are broken but it is likely that some will not be restoreable.

We hope to have the wiki and forums usable again in some days but we don’t know how long it will take. We will soon migrate the main server to a different machine anyway. This one will offer more network bandwidth and due to this make the website feel smooth again. We are not 100% sure if we will restore the wiki and forum completely before the move, so it might be that you are on the new server when the forum and wiki are up again…

I will try to post updates every now and then and please keep in mind that asking “when will the forum be up again” in our IRC chans won’t speed things up at all. So please stay patient and play Wesnoth instead of using the forums. ;) If you are interested in some more info, have a look at the (unofficial) Wesnoth Journals.

Yay! The Journals are linked from the main page :)

So things are looking good. We may not have access to fora or wiki but it should be coming back soon. It is unfortunate that screenshots and attachments might be lost and that it happened before I managed to copy them all to the gallery.

However if people are looking for a place to continue with artwork development you can easily use the gallery for that purpose. I’ll blog about it in more detail soon but in short, it provides personal albums for all registered users, bbcode commenting along with ratings and the like. You should be quite capable to collaborate from there until the forums are back up.


Limping back

Posted by Db0 on August 2nd, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , , .

I was originally about to title this post as “Back in Business?” but seeing as the Fora seem to be still down, I decided to use a more conservative one.

So, it seems the restoration of services is slowly limping back to working order. At the time of writing, the official website homepage seems to be up but nothing else (forum, wiki etc) which leads me to believe it’s mostly a static html page. You can’t do anything more than look at the great image of some bearded dude but why would you want to stop staring at such great artwork anyway?

Funniness aside, we’re getting somewhere it seems. Stay tuned.


It Works!

Posted by Db0 on August 1st, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , .

What works? Heck I dunno, but something must be. It says so right here.

Personally, I think it’s a trap. Large fonts? Bold? You know it…

Seriously though this is progress, even if small. It means that the web server has been somewhat repaired and hopefully soon the backup will be restored in place.

Lets wait and see.


Window to the Wesnoth channel

Posted by Db0 on July 29th, 2008 filed in Site Updates and tagged as , , .

I have now added a little widget on the bottom of the sidebar with which you can connect directly to the Wesnoth User channel even if you are at work or don’t have an IRC client available. Thus at any point you can check with the regulars in case the Journals are not good enough for yah :P

Currently it will allow you to put you own alias but not the password (if you need this capability just tell me)

So now, whenever any other meltdown occurs you can get the gist straight from the horses mouth. Just make sure to pay attention to the topic and you don’t ask the same questions again and again ;).


Campaign Server

Posted by Db0 on July 29th, 2008 filed in News and tagged as , , .

We all know that now that the servers are down or unreachable you don’t have much to do except possibly play some campaigns (no, playing another game is not an option ;) ). What do you do however, if you had not downloaded any campaigns? Connect directly to the add-on server of course

Head over to 88.191.12.200:15005 (for 1.4) then and fill your drives with booty! If you’re one of those bleeding-edge types, then try 88.191.12.200:15003 which is for 1.5