Site Move

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Emufarmers
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Site Move

#1 Post by Emufarmers »

Howdy: I'm Emufarmers. I offered to host the site for Yak and Sparda a couple weeks ago, and after much badgering, the deed is done. As you can see, we're on a subdomain of my site (Emufarmers.com, can't forget the plug) until Yak chooses a domain for the site.

To start with, I apologize for the potentially perplexing situation you all may have been in for the last few hours as I fiddled with settings and such; I probably could have at least given some prior notice, but that's life.

Now, you'll no doubt notice that the forums look quite different from before: That's because I upgraded to RC3 of phpBB 3, also known as Olympus. I had initially only intended to upgrade to the latest stable release of phpBB 2 (2.0.22), but when I did so, some things started breaking, and I decided that, instead of trying to fix the problem or roll back the changes, I would just upgrade to Olympus. I would have probably wanted to do so eventually anyway, and this saved me some hair pulling along the way. Let me know what you think of these changes, particularly in terms of aesthetics: There aren't really any skins other than ProSilver for Olympus so far, but once it goes gold there probably will be.

I also migrated over the wiki: I have a fair bit of experience with MediaWiki, and I hope to make some technical improvements (rewriting the URLs, and possibly adding caching to speed page loads, to name some of the possibilities you would probably notice).

Finally, I've moved over every bit of the site itself: A lot of URLs and images will be broken, since Sparda was hosting the site on a Windows machine (which uses backslashes instead of forward slashes); the main site could probably use a redesign, so we'll see how that goes once we're situated here.


Now that I've explained all that, it's time for me to introduce myself more fully. I'm Emufarmers, and I first started playing EotA a few years ago. I've started and stopped playing Warcraft 3 since then, but I have always considered EotA to be an incredible achievement in mapmaking. When I recently started playing Warcraft 3 again, I noticed that the site for EotA was a bit lacking: It didn't have a domain name, it couldn't send mail, and its front page used frames (which I hope to change!). I host a few websites, and I enjoy doing so, so this seemed like a good opportunity to add another to my "collection" while helping out a map I love.

My other sites include Emufarmers.com (plug, plug, plug the pseudonymous website!) and the Howdypedia, a wiki for an MMO I play called Bang! Howdy.


If you have any comments, feel free to post them here.

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Re: Site Move

#2 Post by Emufarmers »

(I split the discussion on the forum skin into a separate topic in the appropriate forum.)

I've fixed the path errors I could find on the website. Most of them turned out to actually be due to Windows servers' case insensitivity; let me know if you find any more.

I'm still hoping to do a redesign of the site, so if you or someone you know is capable of creating one (for free, but with attribution), let me know.

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Re: Site Move

#3 Post by Tehw00tz »

Teamspeak Server Status doesn't work.

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Re: Site Move

#4 Post by Emufarmers »

Tehw00tz wrote:Teamspeak Server Status doesn't work.
I guess I'll need to reconfigure it, then, but I don't even know what the address for our TS server is! (Sparda and I also need to come up with a way to keep the ranking lists updated.)

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Re: Site Move

#5 Post by Tehw00tz »

I have no idea whether this is intended or not, but eota.emufarmers.com redirects to the Wiki

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Re: Site Move

#6 Post by AlienFromBeyond »

[quote="Tehw00tz"]I have no idea whether this is intended or not, but eota.emufarmers.com redirects to the Wiki[/quote]
Yeah, it's a real pain in the arse, especially when the link to the forums on the wiki is broken.

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Re: Site Move

#7 Post by Emufarmers »

AlienFromBeyond wrote:
Tehw00tz wrote:I have no idea whether this is intended or not, but eota.emufarmers.com redirects to the Wiki
Yeah, it's a real pain in the arse, especially when the link to the forums on the wiki is broken.
Just an unintended side effect of my attempts at URL rewriting for the wiki. (Pages are now accessible from eota.emufarmers.com/wiki/Foo, rather than only eota.emufarmers.com/wiki/index.php?title=Foo.)

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Re: Site Move

#8 Post by Sparda963 »

the teamspeak status thing is a pretty simple php program i belive its just one php file. Prolly need to tweak that file out with some new addresses or something. My current IP is 24.208.26.163

As for the rank system, there will be some issues to over come with that im thinking. I am working on a few tests that may or may not work, involving scripts and times tasks. Needless to say, system clocks come into play when doing this so they would have to stay somewhat accurate. The tests i have done so far havent gone to well, but i think im figuring it out, unfortunitly i wont be able to work on it at all this weekend. Basically its going to be a VB script or a series of scripts run in chains. Update a web page file with hte current rank system from the bots, which i already have running. The next part is hard, getting a timed system in place to send that file to your server, then have your server take it and upload it to replace the old file. Currently this used to take place every half hour, this may need to be changed to a longer period of time depending on how this process can work out or not.
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Re: Site Move

#9 Post by Emufarmers »

Sparda963 wrote:the teamspeak status thing is a pretty simple php program i belive its just one php file. Prolly need to tweak that file out with some new addresses or something. My current IP is 24.208.26.163
I've adjusted the configuration file, but I would assume that your server sends the information to itself; you'll probably need to adjust its configuration.
Sparda963 wrote:As for the rank system, there will be some issues to over come with that im thinking. I am working on a few tests that may or may not work, involving scripts and times tasks. Needless to say, system clocks come into play when doing this so they would have to stay somewhat accurate. The tests i have done so far havent gone to well, but i think im figuring it out, unfortunitly i wont be able to work on it at all this weekend. Basically its going to be a VB script or a series of scripts run in chains. Update a web page file with hte current rank system from the bots, which i already have running. The next part is hard, getting a timed system in place to send that file to your server, then have your server take it and upload it to replace the old file. Currently this used to take place every half hour, this may need to be changed to a longer period of time depending on how this process can work out or not.
I could have a cronjob to SSH into your system and retrieve the data, or I could simply mirror the data live.

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Re: Site Move

#10 Post by Emufarmers »

Alright, nobody has leapt up and volunteered to redesign the site, so I've decided to do it myself: The new site is now on the front page (the old one is in /old_site/ for now). I haven't changed the look much, but it now uses standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, rather than a mash of frames and font tags (yes, fixed sidebars are possible without resorting to frames). I've decided to just rewrite all the pages too, while I'm at it, so let me know what you think (most of the content is in about.html right now).

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Re: Site Move

#11 Post by Emufarmers »

I have added eAccelerator caching to the wiki. It was pleasant to set up, but it should be worth it: My benchmarks indicate an enormous improvement in page load speed: The caching cut the load time on the main page by as much as 2/3 or 3/4. Though it wasn't my focus, the caching has also cut page load times for the forums by roughly the same amount (though phpBB is much more lightweight than MediaWiki to begin with).

The benchmarks don't really matter, of course: What's important is that you all find everything faster. If not, let me know. :)

Edit: Unfortunately, the new setup seems to be rather fragile, and and broke with the drop of a pin (or a killall command, in this case). I'm compiling and recompiling things to try to get it all to work, but I'm not having much luck so far: I'll let you all know when it's all working again. Until then, you might notice pages not loading as I switch settings around.

Edit again: Ok, eAccelerator should be working again. I'll let you know if I break it again.

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Re: Site Move

#12 Post by Sparda963 »

So why does everyone look at frames like its the plague? if you know what your doing the shit is easy to put together. It is the people who don't know their head from a hole in the ground that bad mouth frames. The reason i went with frames is because many of the pages have a lot of info on it and required scrolling. The frames allow you to have your navigation right at your side no matter how big the page is. I hate when i go to a site, scroll many pages down, then have to scroll all the way back up just to go to a new page.

As for the coding and shit, it was stuck halfway through a remake converting the base html into css, but i never got to far on the project due to a lot of things coming up keeping me much to busy. I created everything in wordpad btw. I was also in the process of creating a new site which i think was much better then the old one, when again, i got to busy to complete it. This was being done with Microsoft Front Page. I think most everyone liked the layout and everything of the new site. The real problems i had was a lack of information to put on the site. I tried to get various people to help me out with that but no one ever really came through on it so i lost interest in it pretty fast as i didn't have the time to do everything on my own.

I am not a web designer, nor am i a software person, but i would like to think i did pretty well considering everything i was able to do. Everything i did worked and did what it was supposed to, although it may not have been up to most peoples standards. I don't know anything about html, css, php, database management, vb script, or python, but considering everything i managed to accomplish with the bots, site, wiki, and forum i would like to think i did pretty well considering i have absolute no background in any of that stuff at all.

I am just glad i don't have to deal with it anymore i guess. Takes a lot of stress off of me to worry about other things in the long run. I just hope emu can keep up with the demands of everyone.
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Re: Site Move

#13 Post by Emufarmers »

Sparda963 wrote:So why does everyone look at frames like its the plague? if you know what your doing the shit is easy to put together. It is the people who don't know their head from a hole in the ground that bad mouth frames. The reason i went with frames is because many of the pages have a lot of info on it and required scrolling. The frames allow you to have your navigation right at your side no matter how big the page is. I hate when i go to a site, scroll many pages down, then have to scroll all the way back up just to go to a new page.
I wasn't trying to badmouth you: Frames can have their uses, but they do have problems (have a link or two). Since I found a way to preserve the fixed sidebar (which people seemed to like) using CSS, it seemed prudent to avoid the drawbacks of frames.
Sparda963 wrote:As for the coding and shit, it was stuck halfway through a remake converting the base html into css, but i never got to far on the project due to a lot of things coming up keeping me much to busy. I created everything in wordpad btw. I was also in the process of creating a new site which i think was much better then the old one, when again, i got to busy to complete it. This was being done with Microsoft Front Page. I think most everyone liked the layout and everything of the new site. The real problems i had was a lack of information to put on the site. I tried to get various people to help me out with that but no one ever really came through on it so i lost interest in it pretty fast as i didn't have the time to do everything on my own.
I also coded mine by hand; nobody really volunteered to give me information to put, so I decided I would write it myself (see about.html). (I'm fortunate to have a good chunk of spare time at the moment.)

It certainly wasn't my intention to disparage you or the work you put into the site, and I apologize if anything I said seemed to suggest I was doing that.

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Re: Site Move

#14 Post by Storamin »

are we seriously arguing about HTML coding here guys?

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Re: Site Move

#15 Post by BLUEPOWERVAN »

Mostly I think people bungle frames, but I don't mind it on this site. I really like it on my favorite forums evar, forums.planetice.net ... leftover community from some now-defunct q3 tf like mod wfa.

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Re: Site Move

#16 Post by BLUEPOWERVAN »

Icky double post, wanted to say I do wish the home page had a little more splash to it. You know, maybe some kind of montage of eota images, a gravel for president banner, some transparent screenshots of pyroclasm, maybe the created by darnyak pic from startup, stuff like that.

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Re: Site Move

#17 Post by Emufarmers »

BLUEPOWERVAN wrote:Icky double post, wanted to say I do wish the home page had a little more splash to it. You know, maybe some kind of montage of eota images, a gravel for president banner, some transparent screenshots of pyroclasm, maybe the created by darnyak pic from startup, stuff like that.
I'm still getting towards the "splash" phase of development. :P Give me some images you'd like (link to them here) and I'll try to find a spot for them.

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Re: Site Move

#18 Post by Sparda963 »

That sounded a little more defensive then it was supposed to, wasn't ranting or anything, just stating the facts for everyone that might have been unsure about it. But yeah, the strangest part of the process was that this started out 2 years ago as a "im bored, im gona teach myself html" and 2 years later here we are lol.
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Re: Site Move

#19 Post by Emufarmers »

I've done a bit more optimization on the wiki: It now no longer records/displays the number of times each pages has been viewed. This has knocked the average request time down from 137 ms to 96 ms, though if people miss having page views displayed, I'll change it back.

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Re: Site Move

#20 Post by Emufarmers »

I've upgraded the forums to Release Candidate 4, which came out a few hours ago.

Too bad the 1.11.0 release of MediaWiki was pushed back; maybe we'll finally get the long-awaited bitfields for deleted revisions and revision tagging this August!

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Re: Site Move

#21 Post by Emufarmers »

phpBB Release Candidate 5 came out two days ago, and I've upgraded these forums accordingly.

Still no word on MediaWiki 1.11.0, though: Mid-August release my ass. :(

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Re: Site Move

#22 Post by Kibiyama »

What's with edit counts now being shown? I hate that. I like to edit a lot.

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Re: Site Move

#23 Post by Emufarmers »

Kibiyama wrote:What's with edit counts now being shown? I hate that. I like to edit a lot.
Your edits will include a note of the edit if there is another post after it when you save your edit (that is, if somebody else posted after you), as was the case with phpBB 2. I tested this out just to be sure, although it was a bit tricky, since Olympus apparently seems to exempt moderators from automatically displaying those notices.

I can actually disable the edit count functionality, but it's there for a reason—to stop people from editing their posts in response to others' without it being clear what happened.

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Re: Site Move

#24 Post by Kibiyama »

Oh, alright. I'm fine with that. Turns out w00tz just posted directly after I did, so that's why it showed an edit. Thanks.

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Re: Site Move

#25 Post by Emufarmers »

I've upgraded to Release Candidate 7. (I didn't even see RC 6 before RC 7 came out: Take a look at RC 7 and you'll see why. :P)

Apparently this upgrade causes some problems with nonstandard templates, so I've disabled the Hello Kitty skin for now. Nobody was actually using it, but I know you're all crying on the inside.

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