NEUS Projects

I'm sure you are all aware that, quite recently, something terrible happened to the website. If you're not aware, you must be one of those lurker types who doesn't keep up except on random intervals when the mood to check the site hits you. This one's for you - the unawares, the ignorant, and various other titles with which I could address you.

It all started several days ago when it became very apparent that, for some reason, our Joomla (the software which we use to run and manage the website) front-end and back-end logins were failing. After several experiments, it became quite apparent that something in our MySQL database (which stores everything - the posts, the web articles, user accounts - everything) was corrupted or faulty and was causing several of our PHP queries to fail. If you noticed any errors pop-up on the site during that time, that's why.

After many attempts to salvage data from it, we eventually found that it was a lost cause - having to comb through thousands and thousands of pages containing this data in an attempt to find the problem were not something we have the time nor the technical knowledge nor the patience to do. The end result is this; we've lost all user accounts, website articles, and forum posts. The positive spin is that this only applies to the website; those of you who only play the games and don't check the website won't even know something's happened unless someone else tells you.

The negative spin is that even though I have all of the data from the web articles, I have no way to take the data from them and put them into a readable format at the moment. All of it is in a .pdf file - and this is the kind of .pdf where trying to copy/paste text from it and to Notepad or Word results in nothing but lines of ASCII squares. This means that the game information stuff, the Sigrogana lore, etc are not available and won't be for a while. I'm going to either have to find a method with which I can transfer this stuff to Notepad without having to type each line by hand, or I'm going to have to rewrite them. I don't look forward to doing either.

In other news, we've recently switched our game hosting service. Farawayhost, who hosted Sigrogana Legend since October, is closing down at the end of the month. Instead, we have moved over to ATP Hosting, which offers us more than we had before in regards to game hosting with less cost to us. This has allowed me to do a few things I would have otherwise not have been willing or able to do.

All of our projects, with the exception of the deprecated Zoids Battle, now have official 24/7 servers. This includes Duel Monsters Expert, and on a more important note, Mitadake High. Most of the criticism I see in regards to Mitadake is one that I tend to share sometimes - the community, while having its good sides, also has a large population of trolls, bad hosts, and disruptive players. The Mitadake High official server will allow GMs and Admins to do what they were originally intended to - make sure quality is established during gameplay.

Since the Official Server is run by me, there is no need for concern of GMs and Admins being removed from the equation. People banned from the Official Server can still play and host their own games and non-official games, but they are not able to return to the Official Server unless at the discretion of a GM/Admin. I encourage everyone who has become bitter and cynical about Mitadake to try and keep the Official Server active - doing so will give our moderators incentive to be active, too, and good times can be had by all.

If you notice any problems about the hosting service, please leave a post on our forums detailing the problem. Bear in mind that bursts of lag are common in all games, especially BYOND, where people have to download large amounts of resources at times. I am looking for any continual problems - lag that doesn't go away, server crashes/random resets, servers going down without coming back up, etc. We are hosting 4 games, 2 of which are more CPU intensive and larger than the others, and if the server can't handle it, it's important to know.

Thank you for your continued support and we apologize for the problems with the site. Hopefully, we can avoid things like this in the future, but maintaining such a cool looking place is very hard and tiring work.