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.

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.

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

So, I went to Games Day on Sunday, and had a thoroughly geeky time. Lots of cool stuff to see spread across three halls at the Birmingham NEC. My friend Si took a whole bunch of pictures but he’s not sent them to me yet, so here’s someone else’s shots instead:

Images from Games Day 2007 at WarSeer

In terms of all-new exciting stuff on display, there was plenty to look at. The big event of the show is the soon-to-be-released Codex: Apocalypse, dealing with 3,000+ point battles. I missed out on getting my hands on the rulebook (they sold out in the first hour) but did see enough of it to get excited. The GW design team were running an 80,000 point battle (!) all day long between Orks/Chaos and Marines/Eldar/Guard; the terrain was both massive and awesome, using a set of islands connected by bridges that was about the size of your average living room.

There’s plenty of new models out for Apocalypse, but nothing too exciting. The best new models were scattered across the floor, and can be seen in the link I posted above. The new Reaver titan from ForgeWorld is suitably impressive, and due to cost around £500 sometime around Christmas – start asking Santa now. There was some new Chaos Marine minis, including some Slaaneshi demonettes and a brand new Juggernaut that doesn’t look like a sit-on lawnmower any more.

Rules-wise the big push was for Apocalypse, but they also had the new Ork Codex for 40k (which I didn’t get chance to look at) and the new High Elf army book for Fantasy. This in particular looked very cool, and the miniatures they had on display – particularly the Chrace Chariot – also looked nice. There’s a summary of the High Elf rules in the following thread… I can smell the Brie from here:

High Elf Rules from Games Day 2007 at WarSeer

The reason I didn’t pick up the Apocalypse book was that I was queuing to get a copy of the new Talisman board game. Not only was I one of the lucky few, I also got a special Games Day adventure card for it, and had the cover signed by Ralph Horsley and Jeremy McHugh! I’ve had a brief look at the new version and everything looks familiar but much prettier – looking forward to giving it a spin some time as Talisman is one of my favourite board games.

There was also plenty more to see including the new Squad Command game for DS (which looked like Dawn of War – very impressive graphically) and of course the Age of Reckoning MMORPG. I also got a chance to meet Rick Priestly, John Blanche and Jervis Johnson – although I got a little star-struck and didn’t actually talk to them. Bless.

All in all, if you like your wargaming, this was a grand day out. The scenery on display in the Arena from GW staff and gaming clubs was amazing, and I even had a look at some (semi) proper war-gaming in the form of Warhammer Historical.

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…