On Downtime
Yesterday the official Game Maker Community was offline for at least 12 hours with a 503 error.
Now that the forum is back online the reason for the downtime has been revealed – the servers php version was being upgraded from 4 to 5 ahead of an upgrade of the Invision Power Board (IPB) software used to run the forums.
Version 5 of php was first released July 2004 and IPB 3.0 was released in June this year.
IPB 2.3.x forum themes (“skins”) are incompatible with, and will require a rewrite to run on, versions higher than 3. That said the current GMC design is just a few modifications of a default skin. This would be a good opportunity to integrate whatever the final Game Maker 8 logo is into the design.
In other news the elite invite-only Game Maker Community eocommunity.co.uk has been offline for several days.
(Not sure how picky you are about spelling mistakes)
eo has been rather quite lately…I’d nearly consider them dead.
@True Valhalla
Was rather rushed this morning. Made a couple of corrections.
Eh, they don’t annoy me considering the overall quality…Someone always seems to pick them up =)
“(Not sure how picky you are about spelling mistakes)
eo has been rather quite lately…I’d nearly consider them dead.”
You spelt “quiet” wrong.
On topic – was the update a significant one? I presume it was, since it’s a new release number altogether, but if not I guess I could understand them being half a decade too slow.
I havn’t noticed any differant, and i’ve used IPB 3 before.
@Jonathan Martin: The forums weren’t upgraded to IPB3. The only upgrade was PHP.
@NAL
Haha, indeed I did
The IPB upgrade comes after the PHP upgrade, correct?
@TV
Whether or not EO is active it is still a repository of very high quality GM games. Anyway, they did recently see the launch of Srehpog’s Umbrella Adventure (even though I believe it’s hosted off site). I’ve been told it’s just a hitch in the renewal of their hosting, so hopefully it’s not anything permanent.
@James Rhodes
I later read the whole topic on the GMC. Can’t wait for the upgrade.
Any one who wants to try it out, the GMKing forum has V3.
I checked out GMKing…can’t say I noticed any major differences =(
I looked up the official site…the only major changes that appeal to me are:
Reputation system:
Posts can now be rated, earning the author reputation points which can be highlighted with titles and badges.
Personal Conversations:
Users can now create private topics, accessible only to themselves and anyone else they choose to invite.
I just hope the mods enable both. But as I was browsing the site, one product they have (seperate from IPB) is a blog, and I suddenly considered how awesome to have a blog funtion built into the GMC. I think it would be really interesting.
-Tv
When the GMC updated to a newer version of IPB the last time, they disabled a lot of the “social” functionality anyway (like adding friends, etc.)
Of the two major changes True Valhalla mentioned I’m only really interested in the Reputation system, though I get the feeling this won’t be enabled for GMC since it’d just be adding to the moderators’ workload.
I think the personal conversation topics would be useful also, at least for team projects.