Dark and Moody Blogs

Yeah, we had a hacker yesterday. Must have caught him in the act because he didn't get to delete everything. I got everything restored now so no harm done. What a putz. Like hacking me is any milestone to greatness.

Oh, and I'm backing up the site today. Might as well stay current.

I gave the Dark and Moody Web Page a face-lift today. I made it look more like it does when you're in the Dark and Moody Forums YaBB site. I did this primarily because I want it to look more professional, and less like someone's personnal web page. I also wanted to add a login feature for one of our members.

As far as I know, everything's working on there. If not, let me know.

I also came to find out that our guest book has been completely bombed full of spammers. I'll be cleaning that out promptly.

A couple or three days ago, I backed up the site.

I've also replaced the Dark and Moody Forums banner with a flash banner. Since then, I've revised it a couple times... and I think I'm done with it now. I hope you all like it.

I'm also working on revising the index page. I believe it was Flaxx that was looking for a login screen right there on the index page at http://darkandmoodyforums.com. I figured out how to do it. I'm also going to make it appear more like the forum setting. I think it should look really nice once I'm done.

February 20th, we opened up a board for a D&D 3.5 game to move over from somewhere else, The Rejuvenators... Past, Present, and Future! (a long running campaign for characters level 12-16. Join the Rejuvenators as they race to assemble all 69 stones of power.)

April 2nd, SunderedEpoch opened up another game, Brave New World, based on the Sundered Epoch game systems and placed in a future setting where players can play virtually any creature they may have seen or read about in their favorite sci-fi stories.

April 4th, Thomas decided to euthanize the Marvel Super Heroes game. Just waiting to hear from Jim to make sure he won't be sore about it before summing the story up.

April 6th, Thomas opened up Battle of the Gods, which is a free-form game which emphasizes attendance, attention to detail, and imagination. Everyone plays omnipotent individuals and tries to outwit their opponents in a battle in the Universal Arena. There hasn't been any apparent interest yet, but believe me... this game is a blast.

And finally, today I created a new banner for Dark and Moody Forums, in Flash format. It's pretty nifty.

Well, we have three new games, and a lot of new threads... so I figured it was about that time. Made another backup of the site.

The new games are: The Thieves of Isatarist (by Pyro), The Rejuvenators.... Past Present and Future! (by dsigfuss), and Serenity (by Thomas).

Some of the loyal Dark and Moody members may have noticed a strange problem this morning with the templates not working right, the smilies not visible, and unable to enter your profile area. This was my fault, I'm afraid. I was trying to work to repair the Custom Page mod ... and actually did get it fixed. In the process, I changed all the path statements for the site. Originally, I thought it was an attribute problem on the Paths.pl file, since I was using a java FTP program provided by HostMonster. I had no idea what the attributes were set for.

When I got home, I realized that the Paths.pl file I had uploaded to fix the Custom Page mod still had path statements from our old server, so it didn't know where to look for certain things.

And in the process of using the YaBB software to fix the path statements, that cripples the Custom Page mod again. So I finally got it nailed and it's working great now. I just had to get home and use a program that I could see precisely what was going on before I could fix it.

My gratitude is extended to ccarr of eulogia.co.uk for pointing out the missing line in the code.

I took the opportunity last night and this morning to back up the entire site. It's actually the first time since cutting over to the new server, so it's a good thing... probably should have been one weeks ago, but there were still many things getting organized.

I fixed one of our problems that showed up when we cut over... this is probably more transparent to regular users than to the admin, global or general moderators. It's called the "Ban and Mod Functions" mod for YaBB. It gives moderators and above special tags to use inside a message, which allows immediate banning of a user from posting or from private messages for a set time limit without having to go into the admin section and doing all the work.

General Moderators (the game moderators) have the ability to flag someone, but it's more for show than anything forum-access-wise. There are also priviledge tags (they allow moderators to send messages that can only be viewed by registered users), hint tags, and invisible tags (to make a section of a message unviewable by anyone except the moderators or above. (Game Moderators might be able to put that to their benefit by keeping private notes for themselves right there in the threads. It'll make the players go crazy wondering what the GM is talking about.

Anyway... it wasn't working from when we cut over from the sucky servers over at iPower to HostMonster until now. It was an easy fix. My CustomPage mod on the other hand is being quite elusive on why its not working.

I also finally cleaned off my external hard drive and backe up my computer - first time for this new laptop. That's why I'm working off my wife's computer at the moment. It's a bit disorienting... it's so small compare to mine.

Well, I guess that about covers it for this installment. Peace out, yo.

In the process of jumping over to a new server, there have been several things out of whack.

For instance, I had one banner that was still pointing at a non-existing gallery on the site... all my images have been moved to www.imageshack.org (a free and very useful image storing utility site I highly recommend). So that's been fixed.

The Chat Room doesn't exist anymore, so I removed all instances of that from the templates and web pages.

My Kalamar Tellene map showed the world, but all the hyperlinks that blew up the sections of the map weren't working because in the process of transferring files, many of the file name extensions changed somehow from lower case to upper case. That's been fixed.

The old Guest Book is gone, so I made a new one... it's rather simplistic, but hell... it came with my new server with no hassle in configurations. You can see it at the main Dark and Moody Forums website, on the bottom left.

I removed two games that we deleted because the GMs disappeared and thumbed their nose at us when we tried to ask if they were ever coming back. Or maybe they don't read their email anymore. Well, whatever the case, they sort of disappeared during the holiday season. Maybe one too many eggnogs.

I removed the new test version of YaBB. I think I'm going to stick with what I got for some time to come. It's just too much of a hassle involved in bringing over the old mods that we find invaluable to the new version software. So why test run it if I've already made up my mind? I've got other things to worry about.

I guess that's it for now. More later maybe.

I've set this area up so that we can advertise notes regarding Dark and Moody Forum business, and also provide a place for the Dark and Moody players and game moderators to maintain their own private Blog areas. So if you want your own Blog area, let me know.