Hey everyone, as some of you have informed me, the website and forums have been going down off and on lately. As it’s been explained to me, this is most likely due to some sort of coding bug in the forums causing a massive increase in server CPU usage. It may have been resolved, it may not have been, I’m not sure. If you have a web programming background and may have insight on this sort of thing, especially with phpBB, by all means contact DaveD or Jexius in the forums.

Machinima.com does seem to be taking longer than usual to put “The Tunnel” up, my guess is it’s due to its length and that they’re planning to release both parts at once (at my request). They have a complicated system for when Youtube videos appear over there; I don’t understand it much better than you do.

At the moment I don’t have regular internet access yet, but I’ll definitely post an update when the video goes up, or a web admin here will post it for me. I can’t record just yet, but I’ll be doing some work on other videos in the meantime. As soon as I can record again, I’ll resume work on Freeman’s Mind.

This is an announcement that “The Tunnel” has been uploaded to Machinima.com. As usual, I never know when exactly the videos will post on Youtube. My guess is it will be sometime this week. When the video does post, I’ll have lots to say about it, but in the meantime I wanted to hopefully adjust people’s expectations to reality.

I am quite pleased with how the episode came out and am very happy it’s finally done. Since this episode has been mentioned for years now, I think it’s inevitable some people will expect this to be the best video ever created. While I do have future ideas that I think will astound people and will be worth it no matter how long they take, this is just an above-average episode that took a long time for many different reasons. I’ll go into more detail after the video’s released. I think if you just expect a normal Civil Protection episode, you wouldn’t be disappointed; but if you see this as the best work I can possibly do, then you might. I generally hate hype and like to let whatever I make stand for itself, but this one dragged on so long hype for it has been kind of inevitable.

As for the episode itself, the total length will be about 26 minutes and it will be split up on Youtube as 2 parts. An unsplit version will be released on the website afterwards, but it may be delayed more than usual since I may be traveling when the episode goes up.

In other news I unfortunately didn’t get to finishing the other Freeman’s Mind episode, but I will as soon as I move (and keep making more).

UPDATE: Editing is DONE, although rendering, encoding, and uploading is not. Even though it’s watchable on my computer at the moment, realistically it won’t be uploaded to Machinima.com until tomorrow.

Okay, I THINK we’re good with the forms now, hopefully this version won’t implode like the last one did. The link for it is up at the top of the page. I’m quite happy with how this version is looking. It’s based on phpBB and is almost all finished. There’s a couple minor features not present yet, but it should be quite functional. Really most of what I said a few days ago is still valid, so I won’t repeat it all here. Comments on the front page will be locked, but you can reply to all news posts now in the forum. Also I was mistaken, the posts from the last forum incarnation will NOT be preserved, sorry. There were only about half a dozen on there before it got shot down, and none of them were a cure for cancer or anything. Thanks for the forum go to “Jexius Something” for doing most of the work on this and to David Donaldson for helping out as well.

I’ll be leaving to move in a few days, but I promise I’ll have “The Tunnel” finished sometime this weekend. I’ll upload it, but I can’t promise when it will go up on Youtube. I’ll make another announcement when it is uploaded.

UPDATE:

I’ve spent most of today working with new volunteers helping to build a forum in phpBB and it’s very close to done. The lead behind it (Jexius) was pushing to launch tonight, but said he had to go to sleep very soon, so I decided to wait since a few features were still missing and I didn’t feel like risking a second botched launch in a row. The forum looks FANTASTIC, and I found a good theme that matches the site well. It looks like all user registration info will still be preserved and it’s possible old posts and comments will transfer over, though it may or may not launch with that feature. If all goes well, the forum will be up sometime tomorrow afternoon / evening.

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Well last night’s attempt at the forums was less than stellar. Before I give it a second try, I thought I should get everyone’s opinion on what they want. My original goal was to migrate all the news posts and comments over to the forums and not make people re-register. That still is an option, though it’s apparent the software being used may have a few more bugs to be worked out.

The software we tried last night is called Simple Press, a forums plugin for Wordpress. It has a boatload of features on it and is actually pretty customizable. On their showcase page, they have multiple examples, some of which look pretty decent, so the potential for it to look good is there. The only wonky thing I noticed with it was that their search engine interface is a little strange, but other than that I think it’s pretty decent software.

The main alternative I’ve been offered help with is phpBB. This seems like a solid forum interface that many people are probably familiar with and I’m sure there’s a lot of support for. However this option means that you may have to re-register on the site and that all the old posts and comments probably won’t be carried over to the forums.

I still do want to phase out the comments system on the main page so that all new commentary is directed at the forums, but beyond that I wanted to see how important re-registering and old posts were to everyone. I’ve put up a poll. I’ll go with whatever the winner is, unless people make really compelling arguments for another in the comments section.

So let me know what you think, I’m still eager to launch the forums and have more involvement on the site all-round.

[poll id=”2”]

Ugh, Well we ran into MAJOR bugs upon launching the forum. It’s currently been taken offline to try and fix things. A lot of the comments to older news posts got locked as part of launching it, but I’ve unlocked a few of the recent ones. We may try again tomorrow, we’ll see. To everyone who did post comments, they will still be there when the forum goes back up.

In the meantime I’ll be finishing up The Tunnel.