Okay... apparently I'm taking a small break. Hopefully not a long one. I'd have to push myself to work on it right now and doing that is a sure-fire way for a long-term burnout.

Two big things wrong with it: it's barely maintainable and not expandable.

One of the initial goals was for me to take over hosting the site on my server so Sirus, who has limited involvement in the community now, wouldn't have to deal with it indefinitely. The first hurdle is that this software is written in .NET which wouldn't run on my Gentoo server easily. I won't say it wouldn't work at all, but if it's possible to run .NET on *nix it's probably very troublesome.

Another big goal was to be able to grow it out in new directions. I'm a PHP developer and the majority of forums on the net are written in PHP, so it made sense to move in that direction. Plus I'd been wanting to build my own forum/CMS software for years and this seemed like good motivation.



The original plan was to keep the name and general appearance, as evidenced by the alpha site having the same graphics. Along the way Whut suggested we rebrand the site and pretty much start fresh with a new domain and identity, and he also liked my gamersyndicate.com domain that I've had for nearly a decade and never used, so we started moving in that direction.



Regardless of what we'd call the new community, the plan was always to archive what we have here for as long as Sirus is willing to keep it online. Anyone visiting here would be pointed to the new site while still being able to view all the old discussions. We definitely weren't going to throw all this to the wayside.



We've tried quite a few times. Just for my part alone I've tried to keep TF2 alive, I ran L4D2 servers for a while, a Minecraft server, and we nearly rented a BC2 server. The few people who check in regularly couldn't really agree to get behind any specific game.

We're hugely handicapped since we don't have any servers available for hosting besides mine which is very old, and there's been only a single (nice) donation since I took over, so renting is kind of out of the question. As it was, Bragr was owed a couple hundred dollars for renting the last Tempest that nobody really played on. Things have been settled with him but I'm not anxious to start spending a flat fee for a server that might sit there underused or unused altogether--that's just not financially smart.

So that's been another area of attack: getting a new server to host games on. We now have over $1200 saved up for a server to be used for game hosting. That would give us a good platform to experiment on with minimal-to-no financial risk.

However...

WDFNews has hit an all time low in the realm of activity. The new site software is almost usable enough that it could feasibly take over but at the moment I don't have a lot of motivation to cross the T's and dot the I's. Maybe once I can afford the new server that'll get my butt back in gear, but at this point I still think we'd be looking at a community reboot rather than a revival--if anything happens at all.

In short, the project hasn't been cancelled, but it's also not moving forward at the moment.

After getting the shaft at work and returning to my little hole of obscurity, I've spent the past week and a half pretty much doing only work on the site. And at along-last, an update:

- User accounts refactored to be based on email addresses instead of usernames. It was actually a pretty easy change and brings us in line with the modern social networking convention of logging in with your email address and being able to better customize your display name.

- Account connecting with Facebook and Steam. During registration or after, you can opt to link accounts from those networks onto your GamerSyndicate account. This can speed up registration and logging in, and will be a springboard to other features in the future. Eventually I'll add at least Google+ to the list and others by request.

- As part of the two above, the registration process and screens have been completely remade and restyled. Including a neat graphical CAPTCHA, though it's not even required during registration if you link a Steam or Facebook account. And you don't even have to deal with an activation email if you base your account on your Facebook email address.

- Other stuff under the hood.