Word, Sent to the Press

For those of you who remember, way back in early 2002, we moved to Postnuke as our content management system. For many years it served us well but lately we have grown to the point of nearly 1 million members and have found that Postnuke can no longer support our community.

One of the many projects we discussed during our FFR Chicago meeting was how to successfully move everyone out of Postnuke and into another system that could handle the 110GB of traffic per day without bringing MySQL to it’s knees. We came to the conclusion that we would use a simple front end portal type system mixed with the heavy duty and highly optimized backend of VBulletin. This meant that we would need to seamlessly and efficiently move hundreds of millions of records for scores and stats into a format that would be readable by Vbulletin sessions. Not an easy task by any means. It also meant that we would have to redesign the look of the site from the ground up in a way that would make long time users comfortable and newcomers not only understand what FFR is but also make them want to stick around and enjoy FFR.

So now, after sleepless nights and bloodshot eyes, we are releasing this monster of a site update to the public. We will need everyone’s help beta testing and bug reporting everything you see that does not work correctly. We will be standing by for the next 48 hours or so to fix problems *if* they occur. Please report all errors and opinions via the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page. Or alternatively you can use: Contact Us

Cheers,

The FFR Staff

*EDIT* We understand that some people are complaining about credits not showing up or certain songs. This is being worked on as I write this. Everything will be back to normal asap.

Downtime?

You may notice a bit of downtime on the site later today. We are doing a major overhaul on the backend. Actually, this is the largest overhaul since we moved to Postnuke in 2002. This will be the first of many changes to occur on FFR this year.

Enjoy

Cheers,

Synthlight

UP to the Minute Information

Just a couple of quick notes for everyone:

The song of the week was released today. Yes, we know that it was a few days later than expected but we have good reason for it being late. Yes, you guessed it, we are busy with work trying to get a few things prepared for release. Thanks for Alain and sleepless for putting work into this file, we appreciate it.

As far as new developments go, we are proud to announce that Mr. Lightdarkness has quit his job in hell to work for FFR full time. He will be contributing more .php scripts per minute than you can count in 10 years. Hopefully there will soon be quite a few others following in his footsteps hint hint.

Since our meeting in Chicago we have all been hard at work laying out deadlines and optimizing our process for nearly everything we do. We have a plethora of elements we are going to be releasing and uncountable plans in the next few months. We had a good reason to all fly in and meet and now we all are very busy trying to wrap things up and get things rolled out.

We are still looking for high level (think physics engine) actionscript coders for a few FFR related projects in the near future. If you are capable PM me. If you don’t consider yourself advanced, don’t waste your time. There will be benefits to your involvement.

More to come on the releases and projects soon. More in the next few days on the contest I spoke about in the previous news.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Prize Flux

FFR will soon be holding it’s largest contest to date. The details are sketchy but lets say it revolves around actual gameplay of FFR over a predetermined amount of time..

I am letting you guys know about this contest in advance so that you can freshen up on your leet FFR skills. You won’t want to miss out on the prize as it is the largest to date of any FFR contest. No joke.. Practice.. You will need it..

As we get closer to locking down the details, I will make them available.

Cheers,

Synthlight

SPONTANEOUS CONTEST – Special Developer Meeting Edition!

As many of you may have read from the forums (including LD’s numerous anticipatory posts in the Garbage Bin), the senior staff of FFR is meeting in the Chicago area this weekend to talk about the future of the site. This consists of Synthlight, JasonKey, LD, K2XL, Chardish, and SpookG. One of the major difficulties we have been facing as a team is trying to find a seating arrangement in Synth’s big, soccer-mom minivan. Everyone wants shotgun, everyone wants the middle seats, and everyone wants to make sure that Synth doesn’t wreck the van by challenging nearby cars to street races.

It’s spontaneous contest time! First of all, the prize at stake: $1.72, which was the collective change in our pockets we poured into the CoinStar machine at the grocery store. Synth then exchanged the voucher at the cash register for even more coins.
Read more… »

SPONTANEOUS CONTEST NUMBER SEVEN!!!!!1

ONE AM EASTERN

MIDNIGHT CENTRAL

ARE YOU READY?

ARE YOU SUREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE? HUGE!!! CASH MONEY!

MORE UPDATES BY MR.CHARDISH IN 30 MINUTES.

-LD

Some Hyper Pressure

We ran into some troubles last night when trying to get the song of the week up for you all, and weren’t able to correct the problem until morning. We delt with the pressure, and are happy to release the song of the week, just a few hours late

The song can be found in the secret section, it’s got some challenging steps from Gamepro, that are sure to thrill the veteran players, and intermediate ones alike. Just don’t go too hyper on me

Cheers,

LD

Song of the week!

Second week back into the song of the week, and we have a great track for you all! This weeks song can be found on the first page of DANCE!, and is entitled “Save Me” by For Great Justice! You can even hear the voice of one of our forum members in the background.

Steps by JenovaSephiroth this week, and we’ll keep um coming week after week, until… some major event happens. What could it be?

And as a quick reminder, we have the new search function in the sims DB, so now you can find your favorite stepfiles even easier!

Stay tuned for more updates later this week on new site features!

-LD

Multiplayer Clearing Bug

This should hopefully be fixed when I reset the multiplayer service tonight or early in the morning (don’t want to interupt games). Thanks for everyone being so patient with the fix. I have also tossed in a few other small fixes for multiplayer.

Cheers,

Synthlight