December 26, 2003

A solution for all our active hosted sites has been found and the future of RavenCommunity.net is now secured.

My talks with Pro-filer from FilesNetwork led to full success. He will take over the domain ravencommunity.net and keep it up, including all active hosted sites. Sites for newer games (SoF I and II, Jedi Knight II and 3, Elite Force) will get a new address on the corresponding FilesNetwork website (with a temporary forward of their old ravencommunity.net address so visitors can found them easier). Sites for the Serpent Riders games (Heretic II, Hexen II, Hexen, Heretic) can keep their old ravencommunity.net address.

What do you need to do as webmaster of a hosted site? Write a mail to both RambOrc <ramborc@ravengames.com> and Pro-Filer <pro-filer@gamingfiles.com>, with the title "RavenCommunity.net hosted site transfer request". The mail must include following information: the current URL of your website (in most cases, the subdomain you have on ravencommunity.net) and your account username. Once we receive this mail, your site will be set up on the new server, restored to the November 24, 2003 state. At that point, you'll get a new login info and you can resume managing your website. Click here to write this mail the easy way (requires a mail client). Note that you must send this request mail and you must send it in this exact way or your request might be discarded. FilesNetwork doesn't want to host a bunch of abandoned and unupdated websites, hence the need for you to actively get in touch with us.

Deadline for all hosting transfer requests is January 25, 2004. Accounts whose webmasters didn't request a transfer to FilesNetwork exactly in the way as described in the previous paragraph by that time will be "written off", their contact data dropped from our database and their website data backups deleted.

December 22, 2003

Our talks with Pro-Filer from the GamingFiles Network are still going on, but the future of many of our hosted sites looks good.

The GamingFiles Network includes popular file sites like sof2files.com, jk2files.com and effiles.com. They also plan to release a file site for every future Raven game. This means that they are basically willing to take in our sites that concern a Raven game released in 2000 or later (currently Soldier of Fortune I and II, Jedi Knight II and III, Elite Force, and newer games). More info on this will be communicated soon.

For hosted sites of older games (Heretic II, Hexen II, Hexen, Heretic) we are still looking for a solution, but rest assured we'll try our best to find a satisfying one.

December 20, 2003

Due to circumstances like loss of financial support, hacker attacks etc. and also because I don't have the time and energy any more to manage our hosted community, I decided to shut down our free hosting program.

After the attack on December 11, we had to reinstall the server and restore accounts from backup. Combined with other reasons, this was the occasion where I finally said "no". Lately, the time I was able to spend on administering the server was constantly shrinking, and I was often unable to find the time needed to support our community of 50+ hosted accounts (100+ if counting those that have been shut down sometime in the past and those that never went public). Also, because of the loss of financial backing, we had to shut down 2 of our 3 webservers, losing 85% of webspace and bandwidth. Due to this, we had to introduce severe limitations on resource usage, which caused a wave of resentment among our free hosted sites.

After roughly 48 hours of downtime, the webserver was restored back to normal and accounts of paying clients have been restored on December 13. At this point, discussions started about the future of the RavenGames Network. Though the discussion is still going on, I didn't want to wait any longer to make a public announcement. I apologize for having kept you in dark for a whole week, but talks with potential future owners of RavenCommunity.net went (and still go) slow. It is still unclear whether the domain and all hosted accounts will be transferred to someone else who will keep it up more or less in the current form, or whether the domain will be shut down and another gaming network will offer hosting to our sites on a per-site base.

The decision is up to you whether you want to see this through to the end and wait maybe a week or two yet, or whether you want to be online as soon as possible, in which case you have either the option to look for a free hosting somewhere else at once, or if you have been satisfied with our hosting environment and have a credit card and $9.99/month to spend, we can host you on a commercial base. For details, please refer to www.ramborchosting.com.

For a backup of your shut down website, send a request to webmaster@ravengames.com.

Regardless of which of the three options you take, we have got a full backup of your website (including not only the files in your public_html folder, but also MySQL databases, any e-mails you might have had on the server, mail settings, webstats, etc). This online backup is as of November 24, 2003 and is instantly available (just mail me with your site's URL and username and I'll give you a download location). We also have an offline backup for most sites as of December 10, 2003. Both backups are available to all site managers for no charge (but you might have to wait several days for an offline backup to be available if the file size is large).

For any inquiries or feedback, you can reach me at ramborc@ravengames.com.

RambOrc,
RavenGames Network Administrator