License and Registration Please

We have shut down registration for an hour or so until we clear up the permissions issue with new users. Things are moving quick so this shouldn’t take long.

Cheers,

Synthlight

LD EDIT: I’ve resynced the last 2,000 accounts to register, users who didn’t see any of the site but the header or footer should now be able to see all parts of the site. If you are still having problems, please comment here, if you can’t comment here, please IM lightdarkness42 (AIM). Registration will be up in a few. -LD

SYNTHLIGHT EDIT: Registration is now fully working again. As LD stated, the accounts from the last couple of days have been sync’d up and new users from this point out shouldn’t have any problems.

846,866 Members and rising.

CHATTTTTT!!

The beta of the new FFR Video Chat is up and live. Click

HERE to join. Use your FFR username and pass for entry.

FFR Radio + members = Chaos

FFR Radio goes public.. Wha? Huh? What does that mean? This means we will be allowing any member with the Winamp + oddcast plugin (FREE!) to broadcast through any of the 3 public FFR stations to any audience. Your connection to the radio server will then be relayed on FFR’s bandwidth to the listeners on the specific FFR channel that you connect to. If you ever dreamed of broadcasting to an audience or have friends that you would like to broadcast your signal to, FFR radio is the perfect tool. If you are a band or group looking for exposure, again, this is your chance.

I will post the details later in the forum but basically you will need to go and get the latest and greatest free version of winamp and then head on over to oddsock and grab yourself the oddcast plugin for winamp. After this you configure the plugin to login with the correct pass, mount point and just like that, you are broadcasting. Again, I will release the login / details on an official page in the FFR Forums sometime tonight or tomorrow. You will NOT need to announce a time or date in advance. When you broadcast your show is up to you.

Here is a breakdown of the stations:

0. Auto Playlist. Not accessible. Station 1 defaults to this station when there is no DJ on Station 1
1. Main Station. Plays auto-dj or accepts a connection from regular FFR DJ’s. Login/Pass is private
2. Member Station. Any member can broadcast
3. Member Station. Any member can broadcast
4. Member Station. Any member can broadcast

FFR Radio will be among the many new additions and changes you will find at FFR here this week. We are planning another new section for tonight or possibly tomorrow depending on how development goes. Stay tuned.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Embed Media & SimFiles Section & Bears, Oh My!

3 Quick notes for you guys today.

We are now allowing you embed media directly into the forum. This should live things up a bit and allow you to show proof of your abilities if you wish. You can see the example How to Embed Video and Audio Media on the Forum

Secondly, we have fixed the small issue on the SimFile section and have raised the upload limit. We now have nearly 3000 simfiles for you to browse and download.

Last but not least, many of you have been asking how you can help FFR. I have a very simple answer for you. Link us. The more links that are posted in forums and blogs, the more traffic we will get. We will be creating a “links of the week” block that will show the sites we find that have linked to us. This is by far the best way anyone can help FFR.

Cheers,

Synthlight

P.S. 2 new features will be added to the website this weekend. Stay tuned for the uploads.

Server World

I spent last night wandering the streets of downtown Chicago with a 30 pound 1U Server. I ended up walking almost 3 city blocks with this thing before I collapsed in the lobby of the Chicago Board of Trade, my final destination.

Long story short, I dragged the server to the elevator, went up to the 11th floor and had the machine installed at the datacenter. This machine will be our new FFR home and should make a fine home for atleast the next 3 years (that is when my lease is up on it!). As of now I have copied all 20GB+ of FFR over to the new server but I will be referencing the old database for the next 12 hours. At some point after that, I will move the database local and it will be screaming fast once again.

This has been a crazy month if you only count all the financing paperwork I had to go through. Throw FFR server moves and upgrades and you raise that difficulty by 5x. Throw in working on 3rd style and you raise it another 5x.

P.S. If you want to know if you are on the old or new server, just drop into a dos prompt and type ping www.flashflashrevolution.com if it starts with a 209, you are on the old. If it starts with 67 you are on the new.

Cheers,

Synthlight

R2 Songs Fixed

I was told this afternoon that the R2 version of FFR was not loading songs. I wanted to apologize for the problem and let everyone know that R2 is now working correctly again. Let me know if you experience any problems with the game.

Cheers,

Synthlight

New Multiplayer Server

If you cannot connect to multiplayer but where able to yesterday or earlier today, please clear your cache. I switched everyone over to the new multiplayer server today at around 2:30pm Central Time.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Multiplayer Changes

I will be working on Multiplayer bugs tonight and have hopefully squashed the “clearing” bug that is annoying everyone. I will have to do some testing tonight to make sure that fix (and others) works without any problems.

Hopefully we will make some progress against the spammers and attention whores in there.

Cheers,

Synthlight

Small Changes

Because of the load spikes that nearly brought FFR to a standstill every hour, we were forced to switch over onto completely new servers. The new server has more ram and 3x the CPU power.

In the next 2 weeks we will be saying goodbye to Texas and moving the server again to a colocation facility located within the Chicago Board of Trade building in Chicago. We will be leasing a Dual Opteron server with dual cores on each CPU. The server will have approximately 12GB of ram. Because we are leasing vs renting, our operating cost will go down and our server ability will go up about 5x (hint, new projects). I will also be within a 40 minute drive of the datacenter just in case anything happens.

I had a few minutes to add some of the older header information back in at the top of the main page, forum and adjusted some forum colors. There may be a few oddities in the forum (small fonts) until I get time later on to finish what I started.

It’s starting to feel normal around here again.

Cheers,

Synthlight