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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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ABBL Forum Down
Well, it appears the ABBL (www.abbl.org) forum is offline again at the moment. Hopefully they are just doing some work on the servers or something and it wont be too far away from being back.
In the meantime, please feel free to register here and use this board to keep in touch with the Australian Robot Community. As we grow, things like Forums become more important, and especially now, on the verge of Australia's biggest gathering of Robots yet, we can ill afford to be out of touch for any length of time.
Let your friends know about this board, and encourage them to register. I am not trying to replace ABBL (I have lots of other things I'd rather do than be a forum admin !), but keep this one in mind as a backup should there be problems with ABBL.
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Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:08 pm |
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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Well, I'd like to hear a statement from Andrew Gaze (the Corporate Systems guy), or Karmond on what they think is happening with ABBL before we jump in any particualr direction.
I'm happy to continue running the RoboWars forum if noone is prepared to put any time into ABBL. I'm no PHP Guru, but so far its all gone fairly easily, I've found plenty of info and support on setting up and customising PHPbb, so if it appears ABBL is going to stay down, then I'll look into adding some of the features like Robot Profiles, News Items, an online chat room and a few of the other customisations that it would be nice to have.
The present Robowars.org host is a professional hosting company (www.hostingshop.com) , with multi-redundant links, weekly tape backups and all the blah, so hopefully we wont experience any technical difficulty with them.
The only thing I'm not certain about is storage space. I have 250meg to play with on the present deal, I can increase that fairly easily, but I dont want to have to store gigabytes in order to host everyones profile pictures and so on. I considered setting up a delphiforum (like BattleBots and RFL), which I prefer the format of to PHPbb, but if you dont join (pay), they dump heaps of annoying ads on you). At least PHPbb is clean.
I just noticed the www.teamvertex.tk website is still working (which as far as I know is sub-hosted at the abbl.org domain), so maybe abbl will recover shortly after all. I think a "Sorry, we are experiencing technical difficulties, we expect to be back around xxxx" would have been nice to do though.
anyway, now that I've setp this forum, I promise I'll keep it going unless a better option comes along
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Wed Jun 16, 2004 4:36 pm |
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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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There might be a possibility of copying the old ABBL Forum code and Database to the RoboWars server if you want access to the information on the old forum, *if* Karmond still has FTP access to the current broken SQL server. (which I guess he must have to have put in the redirect from ABBL to here that is currently in place).
Apparently the owner of the ABBL server presently cant be contacted, which isnt a good thing. I'm sure he'll show up eventually, but It would be nice if the forum was hosted by someone active in the community. or was at least contactable.. Any recent news from David, Karmond ?
Another idea I thought about was the DelphiForums service. Thats what the BattleBots and R.F.L. guys use. That way its a neutral service that doesnt rely on any one persons generosity to keep paying their hosting fees.. its a very reliable service and hosts thousands of forums, and I like the interface better than any of the others I've seen, but if *every* user doesnt pay up a few $ a month to delphi, then you have to put up with an awful lot of pop-over ads and junk, which discourages me a *lot*.
Or we can just stay here.. I'm not planning on going anywhere.. As an E.O., controller builder, Publicist with print articles (watch for the upcoming august A.P.C. !) and TV coverage of our growing sport, I have a definite interest in keeping everyone happy and warm.
My current hosting provider does weekly tape backups in addition to the manual database backups I'm running every time I update the RoboWars site. Plus, I have some new features planned that might be good in the future, like a Wiki-pedia user-editable database pages we can all edit to compile our own FAQs'/Guides, a Web-based Chat-room (no IRC clients needed), an easily updateable news box, and other bits and pieces I'd like to add as I get used to this PHP code..
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Mon Jun 21, 2004 1:41 pm |
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