On Downtime
December 7, 2009
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.
I think the personal conversation topics would be useful also, at least for team projects.
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.
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.)
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
@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.
@NAL
Haha, indeed I did 😀
The IPB upgrade comes after the PHP upgrade, correct?
@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.
“(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.
@Jonathan Martin: The forums weren’t upgraded to IPB3. The only upgrade was PHP.
Eh, they don’t annoy me considering the overall quality…Someone always seems to pick them up =)
I havn’t noticed any differant, and i’ve used IPB 3 before.
@True Valhalla
Was rather rushed this morning. Made a couple of corrections.
(Not sure how picky you are about spelling mistakes)
eo has been rather quite lately…I’d nearly consider them dead.