Astrum

I like that color you gave Haggard... It's quite appealing actually.

Similar to our current one. Slightly different, but not a ton. It'll change more over time, but it will never be sci-fi or anything like that. Our logo is more militaristic (thanks Eldest!). Now, I'm going to do something I usually don't. Here's a bit of something I wrote in the BD forum so you guys understand what's going through my head. As you know I've been pushing a lot of changes on the web end of things and perhaps it would be nice if you guys knew where I was coming from. Here goes: Like I said originally, there will be a differentiation between moderators/administrators and regular forum users. My original plan was to make everyone SG green and forum moderators and administrators red and red italic. That may be a bit too xmas'esque though. My thinking is that just like on our servers we have a clear and distinct mechanism to show who has power. On the servers we have the [sG] tag. We don't have an [sG.PO], [sG.BD], [sG.AO], etc... tag, simply [sG]. This let's people in the server know that we are there to help and have control over the server and they can relay any requests they can't handle to someone higher than them transparent to the person who requested something. Similarly there needs to be a differentiation between regular forum users and moderators/administrators on the forum so people know who to go to for help. I've seen countless new members go to an SA for forum help thinking they have the ability, which they do not. By differentiating who has the power to help on the forums we will be doing what we've done on the servers since the beginning. This was always my intent. Now, as far as what groups get what colors, I haven't decided. Perhaps white for everyone (white italicized for supporters?) and SGreen for moderators/administrators (admins are italicized). The problem with this is, SGreen is our signature color, and I want everyone to feel like they're a part of the community (power to the people!). This is why I wanted them to be SG Green. If that's the case then I'm not sure what color would work well for mods and admins. Our choices for the color is limited by the color scheme which is either green, or a few shades between black on white. However, possibly keeping us red would make us stand out so people know our abilities. After all, what use is the ability to serve if no one can easily know who we are?

Okay, this will be a work in progress and there are things I'm not satisfied with as they're shaping up. There will be a distinction between forum users and forum moderators/administrators with color. This is the same way it is on the server with the [sG] tag so people know who has admin abilities on the server. Just like on the server there is no differentiation between ranks, you're [sG] or not. I suppose there are Mem and Sup tags, but that's not the point. The differentiation between name will be there to tell you who has specific powers, that's all. As far as supporter color, no idea, I'll look into that. The problem with our current system is that it likes like a brightly colored rainbow of vomit. I originally thought up how color deviations would work, namely a color wheel: We started at white, moved out into the color wheel at purple and continued CCW (skipping every other slice in this picture). Then SG-As became brown. Then the women wanted to be pink. Then the TAs or something became a slightly modified blue. We can't continue on like this, it just doesn't work. As far as the PO next to garfield's name, that is so going away. I can work out a different system, but that will just look silly. Also, the new user bars do not match the theme, so I'd personally like to see them changed.

Alright, if you're reading this, you're on the new site. Old website is up, but you can't access the forums. So welcome to our new host, eh! (We're now located in Canada eh) Also, the main page where the news pulls from this forum doesn't work. A security setting I enabled prevents it. I don't know why, but oh well. We'll move to vBulletin 4 soon enough. I know none of you visit the home page anyway, just the forums. So it shouldn't be a problem.

Hey, I don't take any sort of pleasure in giving a breast exam... *cough* Completely non-sexual... *cough*

I'll waive my usual fee and give out free breast exams to all SG women!

Reserved Three

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Alright, since we've had such a drastic change in the community recently I'd like to put up a thread for everyone to ask serious questions about the community. They can be anything from where what's the new website going to be like to where we're going. I don't want you guys worrying yourself into a panic thinking SG is going under especially since we're about to transition to a brand new website. So ask your questions and we shall respond. I'll update this post with all questions and answers for convenience. Please read before asking! -Astrum What's the new site going to be like and where are we going? The new website will be similar to this one. We are moving to vBulletin CMS 4.0, so our news page will actually be well formatted and useful. I know most of you don't view the front page but hopefully that will change. The new site will be much more flexible in the fact that our web page, for the most part, will be vBulletin. Having said that our initial roll out will not be significantly different from the current website. Due to personal time constraints I'm not going to be able to get everything done. The theme will be similar to our current one. Slightly different, but not much really. Same basic color scheme and layout and still fairly blocky. At some point I'd like to change that up a bit, but we'll see. I'm working on a map management plugin for the new website which will allow players to submit maps to be added to servers, and AOs and upload maps directly. I'm also working on a category system which is... Well I'll give you details in a later question. We'll also eventually merge SourceBans into vBulletin. A lot of this stuff is on the back end so you guys won't notice it, but it's good =). I will eventually change the forum sections so it's not 30 pages long. I'd like to change it so that we almost never have to add a new forum again. Any more specific questions about the new website? Something fullmetal asked: Strikes removed yes or no. Pshh, obviously no. Strikes for admins or players? I doubt it. I thought we already had an amnesty policy in place, if not I would be up for one except in the most greivous of cases. How are you making the categories for the thread more user friendly? We'll be compacting the forums and using a suped up version of prefixes (that will look nice) to make things manageable. For instance all of the gaming sections can be compacted into one single forum. Right now Minecraft is going into Off Topic because it doesn't have a forum. Worms? Where does that go? The problem is we can't just create more forums for edge cases. The basic idea behind my categories system will be to alleviate this problem so we can easily add a new category rather than a new forum. The current idea for the gaming section is to have an icon of the system (Xbox 360 logo, PS3 logo, Windows logo, etc...) followed by the genre, RTS, RPG, FPS, Adventure, Preview, Review, Other, whatever is needed really. When a user creates a thread they'll be able to select what platform and what genre this goes under. This can easily be extended to some of our other forums as well. I haven't locked down exactly how this will work yet, so suggestions are welcome. How can the player-base help support this transition?? What Ngo said. Don't panic. Also will we be getting more than 2 EC's, they got lives also If someone is willing and capable. Can we PLEASE get a porn section? : With our new web server we could host a porn site ;). Can we make a trolling is ok rule? I luv u long time. http://www.4chan.org/ Will we be expanding to new games that aren't CS:S or G-Mod? We've tried this so many times, and we really want to. As awesome as CS:S is, we need to spread out. We've flirted with the idea before with Insurgency, TF2, etc... It just never takes hold. What we really need to do is expand to one game and stick with it, through thick and thin. We absolutely need community support if we're going to expand into other games. Minecraft. You should read the SA section more often. When I get some time I will be setting up a Minecraft server. However, since this is an alpha adminstering it will be difficult and griefing will be rampant. Sorry. What happened to PB? No idea,I don't keep track of it. Someone else might be able to answer you though. Why isn't there a bigger concern over the huge drop in player count, (abnormally low even for school) There is concern, but there's not a ton we can do about it. If people decide to leave because of time constraints or they found something that fit their style better, then we can't really stop them. C'est la vie. Why is it this community cant hold a napalm or reg cs server down? Napalm was rockin' it up in the early days. Perhaps people just got tired of it and now the only people who play on napalm servers already have their favorite server picked out. As far as reg CS I have no idea. Our community has always been about the quirky mods, which concerns me since we're trying to expand into other games, many of which are very limited in modding potential. A dark day in gaming indeed. Why am i not CA yet! The same reason I'm not in Vegas throwing up on strippers yet. Black Ops server? Doubtful. I'd rather go into the new Medal of Honor if anything simply because the Call of Duty franchise has jaded me so. However, it's really up to the community to decide. Perhaps we will have a poll. Is there a way to bring back the SG newspaper, which could be a weekly round up of major events, announcements, upcoming things, birthday wishes, and reviews of games, mods, and a submitted question section to be answered by the BD's and Garf? Definitely possible with the new website. In fact it would be much easier than on our current website since we won't have to write the HTML by hand. Or perhaps a podcast with the big wigs at SG, with "Support the mother fucking community" as the tag line for each episode. That would be rather difficult to do consider the higher-ups are spread across the world. However, I might be up for doing some podcasts. You guys would actually get to see me then :O. On a separate thought, may we please have a pub server again now that Spiffy has taken it upon himself to repopulate the reg server? If the script from before is still around it could let those reg players who want to jokingly scrim do so on SG servers. We'll have to look at the resource usage on our dedicated servers before we do that. Honestly though, how much will it be used? Opening up a server only to have it sit empty for weeks kills me. Can we get a non-24/7-balloon server? Warparth preferably? Please don't say "it failed". No shit it failed, Sherlock, how would 24/7 razor work out? Or 24/7 mg_smash? I'm up for it if you guys will keep it populated. Although personally I think we missed out on that train. Seeing as the DarkRP server will finally be taken down, when can we expect the new game mod? Suggestions? Are you guys going to do a MOH server? Maybe, if you guys are willing to play on it and we have enough people. Realistically given time zone differences and personal lives we'll need about 100 people to have it and play it non-stop for it to succeed. A dozen people won't make a server popular. When can we preview this test site I remember you telling us about? Test site as in the site on vb4 When it's done. Although you're always welcome to help if you want, bor3d. with the addition of vb4 can we get a fyad/oify/b/ kinda section with no rules http://www.4chan.org/ http://www.tribalwar.com/

I still owe you a birthday present, bitch. You're not getting off that easy. Give me your address!

Real life. No conspiracy theories please.

People have come and gone from SG for a long time now. Blank, Atarian, Zero001, LitKey, Raven (though he still comes by sometimes), and countless others. This isn't a recent thing, trust me. Real life tends to get in the way of e-life. However, I hear retirement frees up a bunch of time. Maybe they'll all come back in 40 years or so?

Don't forget to drop in every now and then. This place just won't be the same with your absence... Or absence of absence I suppose =P.

I'd like to state that I've looked heavily into optimizing the new forum, and I mean heavily. Most likely you won't notice a difference. Biggest difference you guys will see is the built in content management system. There are other goodies for us (well me), but they're not horribly interesting. 4.0.0 wasn't amazing. Latests patch is 4.0.5 which seems to be fairly stable. That's why I'm not taking suggestions. And it's not just the style, plenty of other work has to be done.

More importantly what do you mean? Honestly the vB4 forum component didn't add much. There are a few new things, most of which you guys will never see as it's backend stuff.

You guys do realize that the ZM forum theme was basically just default vBadvanced, right? So okay, I'll just let you select between the default vBulletin theme (which looks like hell), and our theme. Further, SourceBans will be reskinned for the new site. There's no functionality that I know of to allow two themes for that, so that will stay dark anyway. As far as vBulletin 4 being bloated, we actually need some of that "bloat". There are problems with it, don't get me wrong, bloat isn't one of them.

I did a quick edit on the thread. We're not switching over to vB4 at the end of the month, we should be buying it if we receive enough donations though. Due to work and my personal life I haven't been able to do much lately. Although I do have one custom plugin I'm writing half working. I might open up a thread when we're nearer to completion asking for any further suggestions and give a sneak peak. No guarantee we'll use these suggestions, so we'll see. First person to suggest the old Zombie Murder forum theme (usually from people who weren't even around back then) will receive a one week forum ban for being a twat. Care to elaborate?

Huh? What happened?

DNS A record updates can take a while to propagate. We'll be doing it again within the next few weeks so... Hold tight.

We're not out of the fire yet.

Vent is hosted elsewhere. It will remain up.