You'll notice upon loading this page that there are some superficial differences. The homepage and many of the flashier things are gone. Any and every modification I'd ever put onto these forums - which totalled well over 80 modifications - is gone. Yes, I basically nuked the forums from orbit and decided to start from scratch. Let me tell you that even just doing that took me hours - I had to sift through the database to kill every last table and row that referenced the modifications in order to have a clean start.
With that, we've upgrade from phpbb3.0.5 to phpbb3.0.7-PL1. Many features that I'd used mods to obtain, such as RSS feeds or Quick Reply, are now baked right into the software. It's faster and more secure. Look for other changes to come in the near future. For the time being, it's going to look fairly sparse - the style we have now bears resemblance to the one we were using before, since I built the custom style off of this basic one, so hopefully that's not too jarring.
I mentioned before I went on deployment that I planned on redoing RP Injection from the ground up, and this is my beginning. The old site was superfluous (most people weren't using any of the extra functions or pages) and a resource whore. Just because of the sheer amount of modifications and custom scripts I'd shoved in there, it was eating up my server resources far more than it should have been for being such a small playerbase. So I've gone back to basics for now in order to preserve my server. I run many sites and services off my box, and it wasn't fair to the others to get degraded performance because of my carelessly free coding of this site.
Right now, I'm looking at a couple options:
- First is just rebuilding Roleplay Injection in a way that I'm comfortable with. We'd end up looking similar to how the old site was, but coded far better. That's the easiest path.
Second is having Roleplay Injection be kind of a 'directory' of roleplay games and forums. From there, I'd be hosting separate forums and sites for those who wish to run their own games and whatnot - so, for example, Hyrulian War would be one game. While it's a subforum here, on this model, it would be run as hyrulianwar.rpinjection.com, and it'd have its own skin and site like old Hyrulian War did (see: http://old.hyrulianwar.com as an example). Users whose sites really took off could get their own domain name to point to that forum (so that hyrulianwar.com and hyrulianwar.rpinjection.com would open the same site). Et cetera. This would take a lot more work.
Third option for me right now is to lock down Roleplay Injection. Let Hyrulian War continue on its own as its own site and forum at hyrulianwar.com (I'd be looking to import the HW 2.0 archive - forums, posts, and everything - as well as the HW portions from here so that it would be as complete a site as possible) and I'd continue to build separate sites and forums for the games I'm interested in, and which my friends wish to play on. I have a handful of such sites which are currently 'sandbox' play, on an invite-only scheme. Then Roleplay Injection becomes less of an open project and more of a handful of sandbox games, but with some open to new players - HW would always remain open, of course. And there would be a 'main' forum that would work like PBP Games used to, where people could start their own little minigames and roleplays if they so wished.
Whatever path I choose to go down, I will continue to host Hyrulian War and administrate the game for as long as I'm required and/or wanted. So fear not about losing any data or suddenly being SOL without a server. There will always be a space for HW as long as I have a server available.
Sorry for springing the change without warning - I honestly didn't even think I'd be able to complete it today - and thanks for being understanding and patient with my OCD sysadminning/coding.
