News / NE Downtime

As some of you may have noticed, the forums had recently been down for a few hours. This was intended by >geewhzz and I (>posix). We wanted to tell you a little about what has been going on behind the scenes. This includes the reason for the downtime. Please read on.

When we were first made admins in May this year, we found the whole management of the site in pieces. There was no organization whatsoever, Kumba had lost interest and was sick. You might remember he posted he had to take heavy medication. What followed were some rather confusing and irritating posts by him. Everytime we asked about how to upload parks and publish them we got no answer. We then tried to reach darkfire who told us he was still interested to help with coding. Unfortunately, he turned out to be uncooperative, too. Whenever we asked about management related issues we were not given answers. A few weeks passed until we got the info and link to the Joomla ACP that is used to manage site content. However, we could not log in. Neither Kumba nor darkfire had created a Joomla ACP account for us. This went on for yet another 2 or 3 weeks until we received the FTP password from Kumba which eventually was the reason why we could access all the necessary areas for admins to update the site. You see, just about everything we did we had to find out about ourselves. We never received any guidance or assistance from former admins. Unfortunately this led to a bit of an antipathy between geewhzz, Kumba, darkfire & I considering that we were so eager and motivated to work on the site but found our hands tied day in day out for reasons we would never figure out. It soon became obvious that >CedarPoint6, geewhzz and myself were the most passionate about managing the site. Steve, who had also been made admin by Kumba, later asked us to de-admin him as he had no intentions of living up to his position. What followed were days where we analyzed the whole site's situation and development up to this point. We created a lot of concepts for new functionality and updates that would improve both the overall "performance" of the website (release quality, release presentation) and the "service" aspect (overall member integrity, accolade decision making fairness). Comparing the release pages we used to have to the ones we are doing nowadays, we hope you can see a difference that you consider worthwhile.

Apart from the inner-site aspects though, we were also concerned about the legal and technical part of NE. The very first NE1 was hosted on a network site. NE2 received it's own new domain nedesigns.com, the one we are all used to today. Apparently, iris was still too young by the time to buy it himself so his mother did for him. This meant that iris has lost interest in NE for all the time since he has been gone, the site was legally owned by his mother, someone who had never been an active member or showed interest of participation whatsoever. She could have sold the domain whenever she wanted and the site would have fallen apart. We figured that until someone reliable owned the domain, all the work we put into the site might turn out to be worthless, should anything similar to that worst case scenario about selling the domain occur. Kumba told us iris gave him the host ownership at www.hostrocket.com for a certain amount of money but wanted the domain to remain in his mother's hands. Although we're not sure Kumba actually did, but he told us he had called iris' mother who demanded a ridiculously high amount of money from him if he wanted to own the domain. It looked as if he had given up on it.

Unsure what to do, we just continued to work on the site. When things started to get better, Kumba got more and more interested in becoming admin himself again. It felt as if now that we had cleaned up his mess he was ready to have some fun again. Since we never trusted him due to the things that had happened between him and us, we did not want him to get admin status back. He reacted by threatening us to make the site vanish. In panic, we tried to download all the files from the FTP so that the parks would not be lost. Additionally we asked riven3d for help to save the forum database so all the posts would not be deleted either. We went through a whole lot of pain with that because the mysql tables of the forums are so huge that just about any back up tool failed to save them. Eventually we managed to get a half-assed back up of the site content and forum. Luckily, Kumba did not delete anything. It turned out he was just trying to fool us, or so we assume.

Some time after I had a chat with iris. He was very happy to see us as the new admins and told us he considers us to be much more capable of running the site. He was laughing when he heard that Kumba had managed to make us believe he had called his house to speak to his mother about the domain ownership. Something which, according to iris, never happened. He then talked to his mother and soon after the domain ownership was given into our hands for free. This means we are now the legal owners of nedesigns.com. We soon found that we needed our own host too, in order do some experiments of new forum standards we want to try and to have a place to store the things geewhzz and I are working on. Mainly aerials or new submissions and stuff.

As time went on, we learned how to work Joomla and the site more and more. Knowing the domain was in our hands, we were relieved. However, Kumba came back yet another time, trying to cause trouble. He was hyped about his idea to hold H2H5, something a lot of members agreed with us would be bad for the site at this point in time, seeing as neither H2H4 nor the PT3 were exactly successful contests, and we would rather let people relax a little before making a new contest happen. However, Kumba didn't care for any of these intentions and just went on even posting several sign up topics for his imaginatory H2H5. We deleted them. He then created the "inner-site war" topic, where he basically threatened again to make something happen to the site if his will was not obeyed to. It was then when we decided to pull a last resort effort. What we did was mirror the complete site on our own hosting, and through that effectively take away Kumba's power to threaten us by hurting the site's files. This was also the reason why the forums were down. During the time that the nameservers of nedesigns.com where changed to our new host, we disabled the forum so that when done, we could import an up to date backup of all forum content and not lose any posts. Please check the site for missing functionality. We have already fixed a few bugs like the RCTWiki and the PT1, PT2 and Hi-Rollers contest pages with the kind assistance of >Adix.

Our new host is www.servage.net, a hoster that was recommended to us by riven3d, who runs both his sites rctrevalutions.com and rct2objectlist.com on it. So far we are very happy with servage's performance and service.

To sum up, the domain as well as the hosting is now owned by us. Currently, geewhzz and I will be the active admins to take care of this site. However, this "status" isn't really much different than anyone else's, other that we can modify the board's settings. What really makes this site special are its members. Without people visiting and contributing, the whole place would not exist. I would like to mention a special thank you to all the guys in the Release Preparation and Accolade Panelist groups. Everyone is contributing to the greater good and we hope to present you the best RCT creations ever for as long as we can.

Let's make some great RCT history together

posix & geewhzz