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Welcome to the first edition of the INC Gaming Clan
Newsletter!
As this is our first edition it's a lot bigger than
they will usually be, we're giving a rundown of the past six months or so in
INC and what has happened. There’s also been a lot of activity this month in
terms of upgrades and news, we hope this trend will
continue. Some of this news relates to things that go on behind the scenes and
often get publicised or mentioned, so here’s your chance to see it!
Recently, we've had lots of new faces apply to join the ranks of
INC, so I thought I'd let you know who to keep an eye on, and give you an
insight into the trial from the applicants point of view.
Recent New INC Members:
Mexx, Skw1d, Snotfang, Evulmenz,
WhiteTiger, Zii, Half-Baked,
Dangerous Raccoon
Trialist’s this month: Bountyhuntress, Cam, NME, Fezzy,
dave, blade, WaRloRd, meh, cHAN,
m3cha, Frank Lucker, Rop3r, raven, Jake
This newsletters trialist
interview was: WaRloRd.
When interviewing warlord, the most obvious thing about this guy
is his sense of humour.
When asked what
joining the clan would mean to him he said “Well
to be fair these fools would be lost without their target dummy. It would mean
I've become a member of probably one of the greatest and friendliest clans I've
seen for a long time.”
We as existing members
have an easy job. Play with the trialist’s, and say whether or not we think
they should join. The trialists wait 2 weeks for an
answer. When asked about the length of time Warlord’s response was “The 2 week trial I
think is a fair time and spot on. However I feel the application process needs
some work, its complicated to find, but straight forward to fill out”
To end this insight
into the character that is WaRloRd, I asked him what
he thought of one of the MIR, Grandma. “I thought Grandma was
the janitor! erm na he a
great bloke works hard for the clan and to be fair he’s got 2 good co leaders
in glaze and that other bloke....rock on other bloke!!”
This month saw a few of our members battle it out
in a YouTube singing and dancing competition. The task was to create a new
video of them singing or dancing in front of the camera and upload it to YouTube
for entry. The competition was an INC mouse mat from our store. INC Katethy (K-Pig on forum) was our winner and should be receiving
her mouse mat any time now! You can see how the competition progressed here: http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=2648
There
is also a caption competition open at the moment, for people to suggest a
caption for an amusing image found by Allstar. You
can find that here:
http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=2870
At
the moment this section is bare. In future it will not be as we will have an
events team that will be working hard to sure there are always events on
·
We have Bozirra’s
farewell party this evening at 8pm on the standard maps server. Bozirra is leaving for a round the world trip and will be
gone a long time and unable to play CSS, he will however, endeavour to remain a
member of the community by keeping in touch via the forum. We are increasing the number of slots on the
server for one night only and hope to see as many people as possible all turn
up to wish him a farewell. Here’s discussion on this: http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2889
·
On this coming Wednesday Lev
is hosting a GunGame night on our GunGame server. This will start from around
7pm so try and get on if you can. INC was initially started up using members
from GunGame servers, so this is going back to our roots a bit. We would like
to have the GunGame server busy as well as the other servers, the others keep
themselves going with our bot plugins
and continued presence of random people on them, but GunGame takes a little
more work. Here’s the discussion on this: http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2901
·
On Saturday April 10th
there is an INC meetup in Sheffield, UK. This is our
third meetup in this location and we are expecting to
see lots of old faces as well as some new ones. So far I have heard rumours/confirmations
that the following members may make it: Grandma
+ KF Turtle, Leviathan, Glaze, Elay, Half-Baked + Eilyk, Skinner, Translucent, Icedragon
+ 1, LastGunslinger, Dangerous Raccoon, Flaming
Badger, DJ Renegade + Jess, Fizzy + 1, Smithy, snotfang,
meh. There will be further news on this as it
nears the time, but we are looking to do laser quest and a pub lunch during the
day, before going back to Grandma’s house to have a barbeque and lots of drinks
and gaming. Even if its a
little chilly or even wet, the barbeque can still be done as we have provision
for wet weather. There’ll be plenty of people in the kitchen and living room
again and we’ll have some singstar/guitar hero going
as well as everyone having a chance to talk plenty in person. Like last time, I’ll
ask each person to chuck in roughly a tenner on the
day – I’ll have used this money a few days before to buy tons of food (veggie
and meatie), salad, snacks and mixers – alcohol can
be bought by anyone who wants to drink it from the tesco’s
across the road. Plans are still subject to change. You can look at this (if a
member) at: http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2654
·
Zii
announces her love for all things Port, INC alcoholics
rejoice and embrace a new member who purrs in a most suggestive way.
·
The fight for the top spot of the Standard
CSS server almost ends in disaster for Glaze who has Blade and Fizzy breathing
down his neck.
·
Bozirra
prepares to embark on a two year INC goodwill mission across the world, we would like to wish him good luck keeping up with
his intake quota.
·
Half-Bak3d, Haddow,
Cucu and Smithy return from absence and prepare
to unleash a world of pain on the servers, we still await people to crush their
campaign.
As any other clan or society will
tell you, it costs money to run things. INC has to pay for our gameserver, our webserver, our
statistics and occasional one-off fee’s that crop up. No INC funds are ever
used for anything that is not directly related to the community and no-one has
ever taken money from that pot for themselves. INC competitions
have typically always been paid for by the person who arranged that competition
too. It does all cost a lot of money and INC does require a bare minimum of
Ł130 or so per month to keep running as we currently do, upgrades and new stuff
cost us more money in some cases though.
Here’s a list of people who have
recently contributed to the clan funds (in no particular order):
Leviathan, Smithy, Elay, Flaming Badger, Skinner, Nusse,
Snotfang, Haddow64, Grandma, Half-Baked, Meh, Duck_Boy, Translucent,
Glaze, DJ Renegade, Explodie, Rambo
Every donation helps and INC is
prospering at the moment, this can only continue with sustained donations
though. If you can afford to send a minimum of Ł5 our way each month, you’ll
massively be contributing to the continuation of INC. If you think about how
much time you spend on the servers and forums and how much of a community
aspect you get from it, bear in mind that Ł5 is the equivalent of 2-3 pints a
month, it’s not too much. Think of it as buying your INC buddies 2 pints a
month to share between them and to keep it all going! I hope we can continue to
get more subscription donators to ensure INC can survive! http://donate.inc-gaming-clan.com
We have tried to increase income
to the clan by taking up some other avenues open to us. So far the shop has
raised roughly Ł45 for the clan. The Google adsense
is proving a hit, we are getting an average of Ł15-Ł20
a month from that. I would encourage you to not click on this repeatedly
though, too many clicks on this that appear to come from the same IP in a short
period of time will show as unusual behaviour. However, please relate to our
private topic here for more tips: http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2669
We changed our server hosting provider in September
last year, our old one was with warcore and was a
great machine and our servers ran well on it. We had had issues with the
servers not showing in the steam browsers though and some visitors were having
network issues. We were also looking to downgrade the
machine slightly and save some cash as it was
under-utilized. We moved to using
PlugPayPlay
as they offered us a great deal on a dedicated server machine. We've been there
for our first 6 months now and the network and steam have been great in
addition to the machine working
like
a dream for us. We're going to be staying with them for at least another 6
months.
We have 6 servers at the moment, these currently
need some tweaking to reduce lag and to improve performance, but they are
seeing a great amount of traffic and are often quite full around the
clock,
Standard :-
89.145.94.60:27045 (Sourcemod)
Dust2 :-
89.145.94.61:27015 (Sourcemod)
Office :-
89.145.94.61:27025 (Sourcemod)
Italy :-
89.145.94.61:27035 (Sourcemod)
Scoutzknivez :-
89.145.94.60:27035 (Mani
Admin)
GunGame :-
89.145.94.60:27015 (Mani
Admin)
Some of the following commands can be used on
these:
rank,
statsme, weapons, top10, next - all of these
commands, when typed in chat will show you your statistics in-game.
!ts, !teamspeak - these commands will connect you to our Teamspeak 3 server without exiting the game if you already
have Teamspeak 3 installed on your machine (Sourcemod only)
· Swapped over the old standard server from an SM1.2.1 base to an SM1.3 base
· Recompiled where appropriate plugins to 1.3, installed them and fixed some loose code in existing plugins (40+ plugins)
· Installed the GameME {HLStatsX} plugin
· Streamlined the custom admin menu
· Various small server fixes
· Ammended the maplist / cycles
· Created, installed, configured and tested the Office 24/7 Server (including server redirect, voicejoin to TS3 and GameME {formerly HLStatsX})
· Created, installed, configured and tested the Italy 24/7 Server (including server redirect, voicejoin to TS3 and GameME {formerly HLStatsX})
· Created, installed, configured and tested the Dust2 24/7 Server (including server redirect, voicejoin to TS3 and GameME {formerly HLStatsX})
· Installed stable build of SM 1.3.2
· Built up server with plugins testing choke individually (40+plugins)
· Streamlined some processes, removed some code, fixed some minor cvars
· Tested various tickrates, and sv_min/max cmdrate/updaterate/rate settings for performance improvements.
· Playtest with server monitoring (10 players).
· Updated all the sourcebans files server side to comply with 1.4.6
· Fixed the admin groups/permissions and rehashed the admins to server access
· Made some small alterations to the permissions list
· Changed all the server rcon passwords and the way they are read
· Repaired all damaged files
· Advanced server streamlining in an attempt to eradicate lag and choke.
· Installed SM1.4.2 Developer Branch
· Installed latest build of some of our custom plugins (big thanks to Brutal)
· Recompiled where appropriate existing plugins to 1.4, installed them and tested for choke individually (40+ plugins)
· Installed, configured and tested some new security plugins including D-FENS, rcon_locker and KAC 1.2 beta.
· Implemented fixes from the experiments on the test server
· Playtest with server monitoring (12 players).
· Work in progress with an external contract coder, re-writing this plugin to include some new features. New customisable variables include separate T and CT objective rewards, a health boost to remaining spawners once a teams score drops to a certain level, new and various winners songs at team victory.
· Streamlined some code to fix a little choke.
· Created 6 new appropriate round end songs.
·
Over the coming month Glaze will be editing
the custom maps bot navigation files to make them
play without becoming stuck on ladders and all over the maps, this will
specifically focus on gungame maps to start with.
·
You should also hopefully notice clan
advertisements popping up across maps played on all servers over the next month
in the forms of graphic decals, these will be sparsely
placed in strategic locations and will advertise INC and INC Resources.
·
We hope to have the Deathmatch
Battles Server ready for public release in the near future. This is an INC
exclusive server, a mod that Allstar has written from
the ground up. This mod will ONLY be available on INC servers!
·
On the cards is INC own level designs for
all game types
·
New servers to add to the
current repertoire, possibly including Slide, Hide and Seek, Climbing and
Surf. These will be studied for feasibility first and playtested
thoroughly.
INC has quite a large footprint on the web and we
have kept adding to that, INC now has over 44 sub-domains – all have a purpose,
sometimes singular and non-public. We also maintain over 16 different databases
– these could be put into one, but as they are from different mods and packages, if we were to update a package it stands
the risk of trashing everything else – so we keep them separate. We currently
have the forum, stats and sourcebans as our primarily
used public sites, but here’s a quick list of some other things we use:
http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com
(Forum), http://ads.inc-gaming-clan.com
(Advertisement management), http://maps.inc-gaming-clan.com
(Maps repository), http://store.inc-gaming-clan.com
(Shop), http://bans.inc-gaming-clan.com
(Sourcebans bans and admin), http://mail.inc-gaming-clan.com (INC
Webmail), http://stats.inc-gaming-clan.com
(Statistics)
·
Upgraded the forum to phpBB
3.0.6 from 3.0.5 (Includes doing database and FTP backups beforehand via SSH
and SFTP)
·
Upgrade broke a lot of aspects of the forum,
so needed to rewrite edits in a lot of files (30+)
·
Added 5 new BBCodes
to forum to satisfy requests made (eg. Youtube code)
·
Added modification to allow facebook, twitter and del.ici.ous
sharing.
·
Added modification to automatically remind
users when they’ve not logged in/posted in certain periods of time, also
reminds those who register but don’t activate and register but don’t post.
·
Added Image resizer
– this resizes images on the fly using javascript so
that the forum doesn’t appear bloated with large images.
·
Trialled three different dynamic sitemap updaters, none worked successfully, without compromising
forum features.
·
Added newsletter list and setup email
account to go with it with an auto-reply. Created a form that works with the
newsletter script.
·
Created and edited and added 12 custom
pages to the forum for the purpose of newsletter and donations, this takes into
account error message pages for different eventualities and ensures the pages
fit in the forum wrappers.
·
Added RSS feeds to all main forums,
these are updated dynamically.
·
Tested a forum feature that would
enable an email to be automatically sent out each day/week/month with all the
posts that had been posted to a member if they so chose.
·
Edited the paypal
page to add in different subscription amounts and made corresponding processes on
paypal to reflect these.
·
Altered and updated our gameserver banners on the forum to reflect current servers.
·
Created and added the banner for the
shop on the forum
·
Edited banner to make it flash
·
Added Google Adsense
banners to different logical areas of the forum after customising them.
·
Added custom google
search to the forum (gives priority to INC websites and our affiliates)
·
Created 8 new styles in 4 different
colours and 2 different widths, these are all user selectable from your user
control panel and have all been tested
·
Changed registration CAPTCHA to use the
same service that Facebook and other large sites use.
This is an encrypted tunnel to a site that provides the images and verification, this should make it very hard for spammers to
auto-signup now.
· Cut connection to database from webserver for Sourcebans
· Edited database manually to take out all users and details that had been put into it
· Replaced details from members that had been deleted
· Updated all the sourcebans files webserver side to comply with 1.4.6
· Troubleshoot as upgrade process was flawed and had not completed correctly
· Modify each individual group and then each member on sourcebans to belong to correct groups with correct permissions (80+ pages to edit)
· Change all passwords related to database and RCON’s as these are stored in plaintext on the database
· Change all RCON passwords on the statistics
·
Setup statistics for every gameserver
·
Edited these to match our values
·
Created and edited a CNAME DNS record to
make the statistics retain the inc domain as you
traverse it.
·
Troubleshooted
a couple of issues with the help of the statistics support
·
Setup 3 different INC stores on different
websites to see what they were all like and to give variety
·
Settled on Zazzle
one as prices were good and there were dynamic customisation options available
and excellent referral rates for INC
·
Added over 150 products to these three
stores – each one done individually
·
Had all different permutations of our two
logo’s created and a couple of custom versions made
·
Replaced the initial low-res images for
products with ones that are super hi-res.
·
Changed the advertisements that appear
in-game to be suitable
·
Applied for a non-profit licence for TeamSpeak 3 after researching and discovering it’s existence
·
Downloaded and modified the teamspeak server package
·
Created a MySQL
database for the TeamSpeak Server to store it’s
settings in – better for future migrations
·
Created all the channels and edited
permissions
·
Created tokens for MIR and ET
·
Added the INC TS3 to Tsviewer.com
·
Added INC TS3 to our stats page
·
Created a sub-domain to access the TS3
server – better for future migrations
·
Researched into CMS platforms that have
seemingly working well bridges and modules for PHPBB3
·
Created a couple of separate test beds
(complete with MySQL, phpmyadmin
domain, web root domain, ftp accounts, separate user accounts)
·
Installed e107 CMS and modified it to an
almost complete point, bridge was beta and did not have instructions or work in
desired way, created incredible 5-10 second lag on loading up a page and
repeated itself in some steps. Had to delete installation and start again.
·
Installed another e107 CMS, but got hold of
an older version of the bridge, then used that to help install the newer
version, seemingly works better now. Have left in half
finished state.
·
Installed Joomla!
1.5 CMS
·
Installed the PHPBB3 bridge for it and played
with it to get it to work (had to try 3 different versions)
·
Browsed for some styles and found one that
would show off potential to prospective visitors in the short-term
·
Had to edit the way it works as SEO Rewrite
was breaking any new templates
·
Tested how the wrapper feature works – allows
us to place external websites into an iframe, so the
site appears to be part of our site
·
All current Forum members are able to login
to the new site using existing credentials, this automatically creates hem a
new account on Joomla without them knowing it and
sync’s up to thephpbb3 using the information provided from there.
·
Collaborate with professional web design company.
·
Look at incorporating all other INC related
websites so that they appear as part of our new website, rather than external.
·
Edit all styles related to external websites
so that they fit in with the style of the new website, this will mean the look
is seamless from one part to the next.
·
Keep all external sites external, this
should improve performance by reducing the load that any one server has to
handle at once. This will also enable upgrades to each individual component
without breaking other
components.
·
Have a custom template created for our site –
something no other site will have and will hopefully designed
by the same people that designed our new logo. This will look professional and
sleek.
·
Incorporate automatic tweeting from our INC
twitter account to show all news as it happens.
·
Incorporate Server and Teamspeak
Status windows into the site.
·
Include a downloads
section.
·
Include a new INC gallery installation –
unsure of which method to get this done by at the moment, but it will work with
images, videos and other media types.
·
Lots lots more...
At this time it can be hard to say what other features will be used too, but
suffice to say, it’ll be most excellent!
Shop
·
Add all products for each different style, not all
are done at the moment
·
Have custom designs made up