Waking Dead

That’s right, the new forums are now online! You can find a link in the sidebar or point your browsers here. I’ve moved across all the old posts but I’ve had to change a few usernames for consistency with the blog; you should have received an email from me if that’s the case.

One quick note about usernames; I’ve been unable to find a satisfactory solution for integrating WordPress users into phpBB, so unfortunately you’ll have to register a new account on the forums even if you already have one on the blog. It’s not really a big deal, but if you could use the same username for both it’ll help if I ever figure out a way to tie the two together.

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First of all, a hearty Fighting Cocks welcome to all our new players: Andreas, Saugrum, Flexius, Theresa, Chasgar, Kestrel, Ulfnir and Gwenael. We had a bunch of fun last night racking up RvR kills against the Greenskins, and I for one hope that continues.

Secondly, I’m thinking about clearing up the forum, making it a lot smaller and easier to navigate, and making it accessible to everyone with a WordPress login. It’ll take me some time to sort it out, but I thought that we probably still need somewhere to discuss guild stuff that doesn’t really sit on the blog.

So, here’s the plan: the blog will remain primarily my own personal blog, but I’ll post any guild announcements on the front page for everyone to see. Because we also have a tabletop RPG and wargaming group that uses the blog, it still makes sense to keep it mixed-use, but I can transfer some of those discussions to the forums. What I propose is that the forums have an ‘online’ and an ‘offline’ section, but with far less sub-forums than we currently have. I’ll also be moving across all the old data so nobody loses out! It may be tricky tying your posts back to your new user accounts, but I’ll figure it out.

If anyone has any suggestions, or if you simply don’t want the forums back at all, post a comment here and I’ll answer it as soon as I can. Otherwise, in the next couple of days, there’ll be a new forum up for everyone to use. Sigmar willing, at least…

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Well, the updates keep coming thick and fast, don’t they?

First off the bat is some major changes to the way user accounts are handled. You will now have to register an account at Waking Dead in order to post comments. But that’s not all! I’ve tied the two authorisation systems together so an account on the blog will now grant you user access to WakingWiki!

The downside to this is that I’ve had to remove all existing user accounts, so you’ll need to re-register here to gain access to the wiki. Specifically for Mike and Si, if you use the same user name you’ve used to comment on the blog previously (Monroe and Kerriam respectively) your comments will get tied into your new profile.

Secondly, I’ve now added user-defined avatars to your Waking Dead account. These can either be an externally-linked image, or a Gravatar if you have one. This functionality is available on your profile page once you become a registered user.

If anybody finds any bugs with anything mentioned above, please let me know.

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As is my want, I’ve decided to make some rather fundamental changes to the site over the coming weeks, starting this weekend. The first thing you’ll have noticed is the new lick of paint; although Contaminated was a fantastic theme, I needed something a bit more robust for the new features I’m adding. First of all, here’s a list of things that are going to be disappearing:

Community Forums

They didn’t get much love really, did they? Seeing as there’s only about 20 of us in this online community, there’s not really much call for such a verbose set of forums. Besides, it was becoming more of a sounding board for me anyway, and I have the blog I’ll be transferring the static content across to the Wiki over the next few days before removing the forums entirely. Anything guild-related will now appear on the front page blog; the only downside to this that only I can post stuff, but anybody can comment so we’ll see how it pans out for now. I’ll be taking a backup of the forum database should there be a need to reinstate it later on, but for now we’ll make do with the blog.

Additional Pages

This has been on the cards for a while, really. I’ll be moving the info on the additional pages to the Wiki over the coming week or so, and removing the page links. The biggest job will be to move the Collections page over, so that might take me a little longer. Either way I think it’s prudent to make better use of the Wiki, particularly as I can set up additional user accounts to edit it. I’ll be setting these up once the content has been moved across.

OK, so that’s what’s disappearing; here’s a list of new features I’m adding to the site:

Sub-Categories

Seeing as the blog is now the central resource for everything community-related, I’ll be adding a bunch of new categories to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

Events Calendar

No community is worth it’s salt without a decent calendar of events, and I’ll be adding one to this very site. Primarily it will serve to highlight any upcoming events, both in-game for our MMO guilds, and also out of game so we’re all aware of what’s going on. Big Apocalypse game planned for the Bank Holiday? We’ll stick it on the calendar.

Slimbox

It’s a tiny, lightweight version of Lightbox. What’s Lightbox? Well, you know on other blogs you get nice pop-up images when you click on them in a post? That’s Lightbox. Functionality should be up today, and hopefully get retroactively applied to all previous posts.

Wiki

OK, so the Wiki already exists (bet you didn’t know anything about it, right?) but I’m planning on making much greater use of it. Initially I’ll be moving all our static guild information from the forum over to it, giving each in-game guild it’s own set of pages. We can put up charters, member lists and other snippets of info on the Wiki, making it a bit easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

And that’s about it for now. I have a few other things lined up but I’m still undecided about them so I’ll keep them to myself for now. Really though, there’s a lot for me to be getting on with – especially as the WAR headstart is tomorrow – so I’m trying not to take on too much for now. As usual, post away with your comments and I’ll try to take on board any critiscism in a mature way… by completely ignoring you

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This is something I’ve been working on for a while, and with me already maintaining the Bride Burners forums I decided to merge the two sites. So, what we have now is a set of forums for both our MMO guilds and also for our tabletop gaming as well. The address for the new site is http://community.wakingdead.co.uk/. Please sign up and get posting!

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With the Age of Conan launch only a day away, it’s probably about time to mention our new guild. Risen from the ashes of the Wives of Lazarou, the Bride Burners are set to make a name for themselves on the Aquilonia server.

At the moment it’s just the same people from WoW – plus a few new faces – but I’m hoping to open up recruitment once we get going. The guild forums are hosted right here, so if you want to join the guild please keep your eye on the Recruitment forum.

I hope to see you all in-game!

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Its been a while since I’ve posted but I promise you I’ve got a very good excuse. OK, I haven’t, but you weren’t bothered anyway. I’ve been locked out of my site for a while now due to some problems with my anti-spam software, but now that’s all sorted I can get back to posting.

On the gaming front its the Warhammer 40,000 Doubles Tournament in Nottingham this weekend, at Warhammer World no less. Apparently this will be a lot better organised than Conflict North, and with it being over the course of the weekend, each game has a two hour time limit instead of one hour. Myself and Mark R will be taking a joint force of Witch Hunters and Tau, with some nasty little surprises in store for our opponents!

Away from Games Workshop I’ve actually took the plunge and bought the Warmachine and Hordes main rulebooks. Some of you may remember a post from a while back regarding Warmachine, but its taken me this long to actually go out and drop some money on it. I’ve decided that this year I’ll put together a small battlegroup and hopefully play a few games of something different.

Actually, speaking of the new year, I’ve made some plans already. First of all our gaming group has decided that since we concentrated so much on 40,000 last year, this year we’re going to go Fantasy. To this end I’ve decided to go ahead and paint my massive Empire army. I reckon it should take me a good six months, so we’ll see what happens after that. I’ll also probably assemble and paint my Khador battlegroup (once I’ve bought them, obv.) during the first half of the year.

One last thing: I picked up the Dark Angels limited edition army deal over Christmas, so that’s my new 40,000 force ready. Of course this means that I’m selling my Elysian Imperial Guard army – and lo and behold they’re up on eBay! A bargain if I do say so myself…

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Well, it appears that Waking Dead has been down for a while and for that I can only apologise. I’ve just finished porting everything across to a new externally-hosted server thanks to the wonderful people at BlueHost. This means (hopefully) zero downtime, as well as a whole bunch of cool new features that I will start to add over the coming weeks and months.

First of all I’m thinking of porting the character archives over to a Wiki-based system. At the moment there isn’t really much content in the archives so it seems like as good a time as any to do this. Having a Wiki framework to work from will make adding content much easier, and I can open it up to the whole roleplaying group so I don’t end up doing all the donkey work!

Anyway, we’re back up and running now so you can all get off my case…

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As you’ve probably noticed we’ve been offline for a few days; basically the old server finally packed up. But lo! We have a new one, a tiny, shiny Shuttle PC. This is great news for a number of different reasons; it’s smaller, quieter, faster, has twice as much RAM, and about four times the disc space. Happy days!

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Well, I arrived back at home around 15 minutes ago – just enough time to play with the cat and grab a biscuit. I had a good time in Germany, and whilst I could bore you with what I got up to, I thought it’d be more interesting to talk about what beer I drank!

First up was Saturday night at a restaurant called 12 Apostel down a little alley off Sevigny Platz. Dad was on Schöfferhofer, a Munich wheat beer. His opinion? Quite weak, not the best weissbier he’d had, so therefore only 3/5. I ordered Berliner Pilsner, again quite weak but a very clean taste. Still, it wasn’t as nice as Lowenbrau or even Holsten Pils, so again only 3/5. Poor start really…

On the way back to the hotel we decided to call in at Ullrich, the local supermarket, and pick up some supplies. After returning to our room I opened up a bottle of Warsteiner, in my opinion the king of German beers. Now it’d been quite some time since I’d sampled this particular beverage but time had not dulled its taste. Crisp yet earthy taste, not too gassy, and a good finish. Why on earth can’t we get this in Britain? Has to be 5/5.

On the Sunday night we went to the Hard Rock Cafe, down a little side-street of the Ku’damm. Even though Warsteiner was on the menu, I stuck to my guns and ordered a different beer – Konig Ludwig Weissbier. This was a very different beast to the Schofferhofer, but again it seemed to lack the complex texture of something like Hoegarden. It was perhaps slightly better than the Munich beer, but again it was only worth 3/5.

Last night we went to a restaurant called Reinhard’s, which is one of the two eateries inside the Kempinski Hotel. Due to the overall ambience of this place I decided to go for wine, although in Germany I doubt it would be considered vulgar to order a beer with your maize-fed poulard.

Last but not least I finished off a pint (well, half a litre) of Stowfords cider at the Irish Pub inside the Europa Centre. Neither Magners nor Old English was this poor commercial-grade Strongbow-equivalent. Poor showing nets it a 2/5.

And that as they say is that. One thing I did discover in the Europa Centre that was a little more interesting was this:

Yep, that’s Necrons versus Space Marines at Berlin’s Games Workshop. Impossible to play on of course, but a nice display for the front of the store.

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