tsumea

Ok, the forums have been moved. I will be restoring the look, adding back the modifications we had, and updating the links on the site which had links to the old forum so it's all back to normal. We lost a few daysworth of posts though. If anyone could test the email to see if it works? Let me know if you can send yourself a forum email. I've been having trouble setting that up, but hopefully it should be ok now *fingers crossed*.

Good job. Seems to have migrated pretty smoothly, other then the lost posts. :)



I was wondering where all the posts went. :Aureus2007-01-24 03:44:51

Yeh, I was expecting the worst, but the forum migrated pretty well. It's running on the new sql server database, all the posts from over the years migrated across without a hitch, and the forum is blistering fast!



However, the price of all this is that you can't upload and attach images to the forum like you could before. The web host / this server doesn't have any upload components installed (and not likely ever to), so that functionality can't be used unless the forum creator makes an asp.net 2.0 option to upload files or writes a component-less solution, or I hack something up together.

Shouldn't be too hard to hack up a seperate asp.net upload page

I had a quick look at uploading via asp.net and it seemed pretty straight forward. Just gotta find the time to implement one for the forum.

I don't know if it has anything to do with this, but I had a really hard time registering on this particular forum.
It simply wouldn't work. I had the idea to change the cookie settings in Firefox 2.0.0.4 from "keep them until they expire" to "keep them until I close Firefox", then I managed to register...

Yeh, it's the new server and partly the forum's fault as well. The server doesn't keep sessions for longer than 5 seconds (which absolutely sucks), and the forum software needs to use sessions with new registrations for some security reason.

There's no other solution other than to look for new and better web hosting, which is what I'm currently researching. Yeh, it's a pain since I have to pick up and move everything again, but this current webhost blows. The database is always down, I can't use sessions or application variables, there are no asp components (so the functionality to upload and attach pics in the forum is gone), and most of those reasons are why I haven't migrated sumea.com.au to the new server. I have about 6 months left with the new webhost, so by the time that is up, we should have migrated elsewhere and all those problems should be gone.

The forum has been down for the most of the last two days, and occasionally before then. I've been sending emails to the webhost about it, and it takes them a whole day to fix it before it goes down again. :/ I'll just keep sending them support tickets until they get the message to fix the source of the problem, rather than, I'm guessing, rebooting the server.

I also requested they do something about sessions timing out to quickly, since I'm getting a lot of emails from people wanting to register a forum account, but cannot. Members are also having problems updating their info in the forum because of the sessions problem. It looks like they normally give a tiny amount of memory allocated to each website for sessions, and they've finally increased mine, so hopefully that should all be fixed now.

I'll still move the forum to another webhost when the lease is up though.

Well, that was a bit disappointing.

Yep, the forum was down for the last four or so days, and the webhost acknowledge that something is wrong at their end. They're planning to move our databases to a new server, and well, they actually haven't yet. Which probably means a bit more downtime when they do move it across.

Yeah, that was a bit disappointing. But its good to see the host has admitted it was a problem at their end and will do something to compensate for it.

-caseyjones

Sorry guys, I'm gonna have to put the forum offline for a bit. I need to update the forum software, since there was a big release yesterday.

Ok, all done.. Now I have to modify the css file to put all my design changes back in :/

The big move has happened, and the forum and databases are on a new server. I can't seem to get on forum.sumean.com though (it chucks up a password prompt so I have to visit the forum via a preview directory). I'm guessing the dns hasn't completely propogated yet although I can see that a few of you on here ok.

Yeh, the console reports for the last few was probably a bit overkill. It's a bit hard to find local game dev related news around this time of the year though. It's usually pretty quiet when it comes to relevant news reports around Christmas.

Ok, thanks to everyone who applied. I've selected 3 people for the news team, and I've sent them a message letting them know. For those that missed out, I will keep you for future reference in case more positions open up.

Ok, I just checked out the problem and I know exactly why it's doing that. The problem will go away once there are 20 total journal entries for musicians, or if I write some fidgety stuff to get around it. In any case, I wouldn't worry about it at the moment - your journal posts are getting into the database just fine.

I posted to Gaming instead which seemed to work.

I dunno I?d have to say no, I don?t think you need a whole bunch of peoples ranks to decide for your self if you like an image or not. You should like it because it appeals to you not because 10 other people have given it 5/5 stars.

Yeh, that's pretty much the reason why I'm rather hesitant in applying this feature for member's pics.

However, the positive for this idea is that it should encourage more visitor comments and feedback. It seems like people are pretty casual in providing comments and feedback to members pics - it's not as frequent as I hope it would be, so adding some sort of 'fun' ranking option as an extra incentive could get some more feedback action happening.

I've been thinking over and weighing the pros and cons for the idea, and I think it's probably best to just give members the option if they want their work to be ranked by visitors, or only sumea members, or both.

Yea as an option that you can have on or off sounds alot better :D

Where is my bucket of ice!!!!1!37 I demanded some ice. Have at you! *shakes fist*

Another point, in addition to resetting your password you may need to request an authenication email to change anything.

Hey its MoonUnit, ive no idea what i set as my email account in my
MoonUnit account because it tells me its incorrect. So is it possible
for you to change it to moonie1988 (at) gmail (dot) com or just change
my password for me or some such? email me at that address if you want
to just give me a password or something. I can prove my idendity or
something if need be..... you (souri) made a game (or tried to)
attempting to get me into as many bars as possible like 2 or so AGDCs
ago. One sucessfull attempt was the sports bar at crown. IT IS I!

For anyone else who can't remember the email account they registered with, instead of registering again here to tell me, go to http://www.sumea.com.au/scontact.asp and let me know your forum username and your current email address so I can forward you the email address that you registered with.



So with that username and the old email address, you can reset your password, which will be sent to the old email address. If your old email address is defunct, then you'll have to prove to me somehow that you're that person.

Souri,



Is it possible to include the 'what new topics have popped up since i last arrived' button to this forum ?



If im blind, ignore my ramblings, but that single button is a damn huge advantage over SOOOOOO many other forums.



Otherwise, let the good times roll

Neffy almost went insane retyping her password very carefully -_-

FORUM! *hugs* Oh how I missed thee! :D

Are we going to get the old look back?



EDIT:



Ok, found one bug upto now.



http://sumea.com.au/sumeaforum/forum_posts.asp?TID=4094



Caroo had the most recent topic in the design discussion forum, but it doesn't appear at the top of the topic listing when you load the page (on the main page however where every sub-forum is listed it credits him as having last post)Tron2006-09-21 07:21:43

AHHHH! My designer posts have lost all formitting..



WHY WORLD!! WHY HAND M SUCH A CRUEL FATE!!



T_T now...do i bother to fix them...

Yeh, some sections (for example, the jobs listings) don't show the most recent posts. The posts are there but they're not ordered entirely correctly. This is due to some quackery during the database transition. However, as more posts are added, it'll all sort itself out.



Yeh, I'll be making the forum look better, and those banner ads will be gone soon.Souri2006-09-21 14:34:54

[QUOTE=Souri] Yeh, some sections (for example, the jobs listings) don't show the most recent posts. The posts are there but they're not ordered entirely correctly. This is due to some quackery during the database transition. However, as more posts are added, it'll all sort itself out.



Caroo, try editing your posts and submitting (in most cases this will fix things up). Although you may have to change the forum code for headings.



Yeh, I'll be making the forum look better, and those banner ads will be gone soon.[/QUOTE]



it seems that bug only occurs on posts which had no replys. Adding a new reply to the messed up threads bumps them back to their rightful place. :D

Thanks for sorting out the first issue souri. But now it seems i cant change my password, i get the following:



Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a005e'



Invalid use of Null: 'Replace'



/sumeaforum/functions/functions_filters.asp, line 524

You know, I actually know how to get around that. If you're on msn messenger sometime and I'm on, msg me. I'll have to modify that page and quickly revert it back when you're done. sumea at hotmail.com

btw, the case of the messed up emoticons is fixed. Everyone needs to go to their forum profile and choose yes to "Enable the WYSIWYG post editor"
under "Forum Preferences", otherwise when you edit or quote posts with emoticons, they get screwed up.

Ok, Souri and I stayed up late trying to make the forums better, so far we've fixed the line breaks to work how it was before (it's ok caroo, I removed them all from your edited posts), the quote formatting for old posts, and smilies in the plain text version of the reply form. There are still a few problems with editing posts in the plain text box, after editing a post with the WYSIWYG editor - still working on that.

has a question like this already been posted, if not I would just like to say that I can't view the images on the forums, can some1 tell me why?

Also I want to be a member of the sumea creative section but I cannot log in, can someone tell me how to create an account for that, thnx:)

You can register for a Sumea journal att this page.

The posts which contain images tht can't be viewed are all from the old forum - I'll get onto fixing that real soon.

Just a reminder for members not to update their old posts so that their images show up properly.

I'll be fixing this early next month (when my broadband gets unshaped )

[QUOTE=Souri] You can register for a Sumea journal att this page.

The posts which contain images tht can't be viewed are all from the old forum - I'll get onto fixing that real soon.[/QUOTE]

You forgot to add audio or design for what you are.

Also if you're Australian but are overseas does that preclude you now from holding a journal?

I'm currently working on designing the Sumea creative page, and adding audio or design as an option for the registration page is definately planned once I get the design up.
You can still apply if you're overseas but Australian.

Yay, finally able to log back in!

I tried it, and it took me to http://www.sumea.com.au/sfailed.asp

I just fixed it a few hours ago, thanks.

There are two modes to your page. The journal entry mode, which shows your journal entries. The profile comments mode, which shows any comments that people have made for you.

The gallery won't work if you don't actually have any pics in there - I should make it more friendly, but I'll definately get onto that later.

Make sure you log in to your account (where it says Journal / News Login ) to make posts and upload art.

Souri,

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately when I log in as you say I see nothing to indicate a new post or uploading. I do get the two links for journal and comments mode, and comments mode appears to let me comment. When I click the journal mode side it has the send an email to member boxes.

Dale

EDIT: Just found out I can edit. Sorry.
1. Top of page says "Logged in: DaleK"
2. Just checked in IE (as I normally use Firefox) and getting a script error line 107 character 33 "expected ;" in page http://www.sumea.com.au/sprofile.asp?member=390

Hope this helps. :)

Yeh, when you log in, the black bar of menus up the top change a bit. The "Logged in: DaleK" button will take you directly to your page. The button next to it is Sumea Admin, and that's what you click to go in to the admin section and do all the editing.

Thanks for the script error report [:)]. Will get onto that one soon.

Sorry Souri,

But when I'm logged in and click the Admin button it takes me directly back to the homepage (doesn't matter what page I have open) and I'm still unable to do anything if I go back to my profile.

Ok, I screwed up big time with the backend. It should all be ok now. Let me know if you run into any more problems because they do help me with fixing things. [:)]

Thanks, all works. Journal updated. :-)

I suggested this before, or something similar, and no one was interested. It's a good idea in my opinion, but I doubt it would get implemented.

Yeh, we've had this discussion before. We've had suggestions of capturing i.p, having logins, or other means to identify the poster as a way to stop some of the more idiotic posts in commentary.

The thing is, anonymous posting overall has been more of a benefit than a problem. I honestly believe most of the comments posted would not have been made if there was an extra barrier like logging in needed. Some of the more insightful posts in Sumea news, of which there have been plenty (Perception thread, retaining IP for example) were written by those who, I'm certain, would very much prefer to remain anonymous.

Yeh, I know this concern is probably due to that thread that was sidetracked by AC's with Lorien getting baited, but rather than requiring a login which, like I mentioned, will reduce the numbers of comments posted, you could simply let me know and I'll fix the comment thread up.

lol, what website isn't hard to surf on a PSP

Yeh, the site will be hard to browse on anything lower than 1024x768, but 1280x1024 or greater would be more comfortable.

A fair while ago, I changed the site from old style html (tables for layout) to completely css so that I could offer different skins for the site (like a clean version with hardly any gfx, or a version so that PSP's or palmhelds can view the site).

And I did offer that for a little while, but the problem is that the site is still growing, and everytime I made changes and updates, I had to edit each skin every time. It was slowing the development process down a lot, so I've only concentrated on the main skin. Maybe when everything's done, I'll do go back and do skins for small screens.

I found it unusual to use on my 1024x1280 screen at work, but since the latest change it hasn't been that bad.

Needless to say making any sort of graphical interface work on small screens is hard work. I tried google mail on my mobile phone, it worked, but I had to scroll down way too much to read anything.

It works, but it ain't pretty.

while we're on this topic, has anyone tried that DS browser?

It's never happened to me! That is pretty darn odd, I must say. If Sumea ever redirects to McDonalds, it's definately not on purpose, particularly since I can't stand eating that stuff. [:D]

Where is this archive icon you speak of?

Ok, so it's visable from the category view, but is that it?

Yep, I think so. It's not totally seperated from the main forum really, though. You can still include it when you're using the forum search.

Unfortunately the dev pages are turning up all over each other, like so (IE6):





Not to put a spoiler on your efforts though. @:-)Souri2006-09-20 14:26:40

Ah right, that was a little boo-boo. It's fixed now.

Finally finished a big part the conversion previously. All of Sumea's news is now stored in xml files which are added or can be edited / deleted by news administrators via Sumea admin. I just checked the database and can see that it's about a third the size it was before. Good stuff [:)] I'll be able to get it down even further when I do the same thing to Sumea Member news.

Yes, another update on Sumea stuff. I've finally finshed all the datebase->xml stuff, along with all the corresponding changes to the admin and the rest of the site to read/write/append to xml files. Total size of the database is 1/5th of the original size, which can only mean good things for server load and speed. Less interactions with the database also means that I have less work to do with the access -> mysql database change, which I will get on to at a much later date (got so much other stuff I want to get done first).

Redwyre has done some muchly needed stuff to Sumea maps, so if you haven't checked that area out, it all works properly now.

The next step now is a few other miscallaneous changes needed around the site to make adminstrating a bit easier (things like deleting specific comments from news items etc). But once that stuff is finished, it's on to Sumea Gallery and Sumea Creative.

I know I've been neglecting Sumea profile members for a while now, but all the future updates on Sumea are going to be all about you. Fixing up a few things, making things clearer with Journal styles and providing some extra skins myself. I'll even make a rating system so people can see the quality skinds are available. Other huge things planned are better gallery functionality, and Sumea Creative, which will be a hub into all your profiles and will be promoting all the fantastic work you're uploading. I'll also be adding new categories for members, so along with mapper, modeller, programmer, 2D artist, we'll have animators, musicians and designers (graphic). Of course, Sumea can't host animations and mp3's (don't have the space [:(]), but with the growing popularity of YouTube and Google videos, that should be sorted easily. You can hotlink to YouTube videos as well, so they can show up in your journal.

I've also got some major plans for new sections that will give Sumea journal members a reason to log in more and make more use of their Sumea profile. I know it's pretty telling when I have a profile and yet I haven't written much in it for ages. I won't reveal too much about it yet, but I think it'll be great! So if you have a Sumea profile/journal, hang in there for some major changes real soon!

I think Sumea is, without a doubt, the best developer resource in Australasia, and we could easily take the crown for the best creative hub in Australasia with the planned new changes.

Another update on the site.

I've been fixing up a bit of stuff for Sumea members.

I've cleaned up the Journal Styles, and made it a little bit less "lame" when creating your own journal styles. It should make a tiny bit more sense now. Help links are made easier to notice, and members styles are ranked for other members to see and use if they like. You can also see if anyone else is using your journal style if you made one.

I've removed about 40 or more members. I've mainly been targetting members who've only logged in once or twice in 2 or 3 years, and have never actually made a journal post. Also, members who logged in a few times, removed all their details (their profile description for example), and then left it at that were also removed.

Fixed a little bit of css problems in the page that serves everyone's journal pages. It should look much better now. I've also implemented a new gallery service, which isn't complete yet but you can try it out. If you have a gallery or if you visit anyone's gallery, there's a small link under your/their name where you can try out the new gallery. To save you some time, check out Bumskee's gallery here:

http://www.sumea.com.au/sgallery2.asp?id=242

You can click on the pic to view the next pic (which it preloads) and there's some fancy javascript effects happening as well. It's not looking right at the moment with those links, but I'm heading off in ten minutes so I'll fix it later. Galleries will sorta be like an area where you can discover other members work, which is why all those links are there.

More site updates...

Sumea Creative is pretty much finished and very usable. It just needs some small fixes here and there (avatar, recent posters links don't work correctly). It also needs a new design, but I'll leave it clean and bare for the time being until I get onto that. It's got some funky ajax happening for the memberlist too. I sorta had some elaborate ideas for Sumea Creative, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the news gathering and maintenance would really be the end of me. I'm not sure if people would really be interested in software news, version updates, and other artist related news anyway. So for the moment, it'll stay as it is, as a gateway to all the member art, journals, and jobs on Sumea.

I've also put back some functionality which I took out a while ago when Sumea comments got overhauled to xml. If you log into Sumea admin, and then post in the comment areas around the site while still logged in, your posts will be coloured differently to the regular anonymous posters, and it'll also link to your journal page. Another neat thing is that all your posts you make (whether it be in news, commenting on gallery pics, votes etc) will be listed on your journal under a heading called "My Sumea Comments" where people can click and head straight to the comment you made. You can see an example on my journal. http://www.sumea.com.au/sprofile.asp?member=1

So make sure you're logged in before you post comments, but also remember to eventually log out for security reasons!

Now, the next step is to start on the new Sumea Game section and other initiatives. I'll write briefly about two problems I think concern Sumea.

1. Making decent art/work takes time, members don't need to log in frequently to post something in their journals. So we have quite a large amount of member journals that are barely used often enough. The site needs to give members other reasons to log in.

2. Regular Sumea visitors are probably bored. There's a lot of game developer content and information, but if you're visiting frequently, you're not hitting up on developer information on every visit. You'll come check the news and latest comments, the forum, maybe the odd new gallery picture, and that's it. What this means is that we need more new forms of content on the site.

Sumea Game will pretty much be a game blog section on Sumea which Sumea members can contribute to if they like. I know from time to time there are a few things I'd like to post about certain games or game related issues, and I'm sure by many others do as well, since the common thing we all have here are games. What this also means is that I'll be opening up the journals to regular gamers as well, not just for creative people. Sumea Game won't be just a member contributed blog though, there's this other huge part which I'll work on adding. I'm not certain exactly sure how I'll implement it just yet, but it'll be another cool thing for Sumea members.

I have a few other ideas, but more about them down the track!

Oh, I also should have mentioned, if you log in to Sumea admin, and then you go off making posts in the comment areas on the site, your posts won't get filtered in any way. So if you want to post a website link or profanity (within limits, of course), that's fine.

I know some regulars are concerned about comment posters faking poster names to confuse readers of the thread, and since I'll be opening up journals for pretty much everyone soon, you can just apply for a Sumea profile and post under that.

Some brief Sumea website news for anyone interested. There haven't been much updates in the past few weeks. I just finished some freelance work, and I think that'll be the end of any more freelance graphic design work I do. I think reached the point where I only enjoy doing design work when I'm doing it for myself. So I'm back on track updating the site from now on and working on various projects, some of which will hopefully bring some revenue in. One of those ideas is that I'll be getting back into designing some Sumea and game related shirts so they'll be available sometime before Summer hits. More about that later!



The website still hangs and it peeves me off. It usually fixes itself after a few minutes though, but that's not good enough. I've gone through optimizing the site more and reducing database connections when I can get away with it. I've been monitoring the site when it does go down, and then I discovered that it's not of my doing at all. It's the forum that's hanging the site. >:(



I'm reworking the games profiles on the site and Sumea games. I'm leaving the game blogging functionality in there, unfortunately members haven't jumped on the idea so far and I wasn't expecting to be filling that section up myself all the time. Sumea Games will encompass the newstation idea I had, and I'm still up on ideas how I'm approaching that. I was even looking into learning C# to program a rss reader which posts onto Sumea when it finds relevant links. Visual C# 2005 Express Edition seems pretty cool, and some of the simple tutorials seem way too easy to get stuff working. The OOP stuff makes my head swim though, but everything else seems like what I've been doing with asp or working with Dreamweaver.Souri2006-09-20 14:25:14

The problem with Snitz (another website updates rant) and why, out of nowhere, the forum was shut down and migrated over...



In the midst of redesigning Sumea Creative and Sumea Game, I visited some small art site and noticed that they had thumbnails of pics uploaded to the forum. It's not a new idea, but it's definately a cool feature. It was suggested ages ago by J.I.Styles for Sumea forum, and I probably said something like it being too much of a pain to implement.

I had a look at conceptart.org and their forums have it as well, and as I thought about implementing it on Sumea forum, it highlighted the major flaws that the forum software Sumea was using (Snitz).

Basically, not much development has happened with Snitz since I first got it and put it up in 2002. Back then it was *great*. Now, it's terribly dated. It's still spitting out html code and grabbing table colours, font sizes, and tonnes of other customised appearance options from the database everytime the page drew, where as most forums sensibly use CSS and therefore offer skinning possibilities. All the features that I've had to modify into the forum, some of which have long been standard in most other forum software, are still not in the latest version of Snitz. Features painfully implemented include: Who's online, member avatars, file attachments, quoting text, jump to latest msg post, members birthdays, alternating background colours for posts, private messages, and more over the years. And adding each feature got harder and harder because the code got messier and things had the likely chance of breaking. And when the forum got a security update, you either had to find what exactly they changed (usually a lot of snippets here and there) and modify them all into the forum, or start a fresh install and modify all those features you implemented back in again. Then you do this all over again when the next update came, which was usually nothing more than another security update. Needless to say, I didn't update the forum through a few updates.

So even though I had a rough idea on how to implement a thumbnail gallery on the previous forum, I didn't want to waste my time implementing it. Couple that with the fact that the Snitz was hanging the site, and that some spammers got through a while ago and emailed hundreds of people the 419 scam in the memberlist, I was off looking for a better replacement.

I found Web Wiz Forum, and I was stunned. This forum software did all the things that I had implemented in the Sumea forum, and it did them miles better too. It's got tonnes of more features as well, and it also has captcha and other good measures so that spammers can't abuse the forum.

I looked into how a thumbnail gallery could be implemented in the new forum, and on paper it should be a breeze compared to what I'd have to do with the previous forum. The new forum has has a table column in the database for attached images, and you can just match and display all the recent threads that have image attachments. Simple. The previous forum didn't store attached filenames in the database, and it searched for them via the file system object. What this means in implementing a thumbnail gallery is that I'd have to search the uploaded images on the server for the latest images, but I still didn't have info on where the thread that the pic has been posted actually is. So I would have to do some other complicated procedure to store that somwhere after members upload. With the new forum, it's a simple database query.

So, to sum up, new forum = good. Old forum = bad. Thumbnails of uploaded images = coming soon!!

So last week, we were using Snitz forum and I was facing the dilemma of putting in some really bad hack to have a "recent uploaded thumbnails" for the forum. Trust me, it would've been ugly.

Here we are, a week later, transitioned to an entirely new forum, and I've already written that functionality into the new forum. You can't see it yet as only pics uploaded into the exhibition section - finsihed workds will get thumbnails, and since there aren't any works in there yet, there's no thumbnails to show. Once we get a few pics uploaded, I'll enabled the thumbnails to show up on the top of the forum where the banner ad is.

Speaking of banner ad, I've just registered for a paypal account last week, and I'm waiting on the some funds sent from my bank account to paypal to pay for the forum, so those ads will be gone real soon now!

Awesome :) I always love this feature over at zbrush central and cgtalk etc. Encourages people to view threads and also post new works, so it's good all around. Question though, Is it limited to one thumbnail per thread? Could get cluttered if people are posting multiple images in succession? Not to mention spamtastic if abused.

thumbnails are good.
Not so sure of the two seperate sections for posting work though. Is there really enough regular posts to justify having them seperate since there is only a small amount of posts every few days.

Anyway loving the new forums and look.

It's limited to one thumbnail per new topic post, and only in the exhibition - finished worked section. Any replies with uploaded images won't get thumbnails, and if you upload more than one image in a new topic, it'll only thumbnail the first one. So hopefully there shouldn't be any problems with spamming.

As for the two sections for posting work - we'll see how it goes. I just didn't want the forum thumbnails to be dominated by a lot of unfinished work. Of course, those who post unfinished work and then finish it later on can always post it again in the finished work section.

Forum has been paid and all the ad banners should be gone!

Sumea Creative is nearly complete functionality wise. You can search all the jobs posted on Sumea in their categories (programmer, 2d artist, QA etc). Spent all yesterday night going through 2000+ news items to categories all the job posts . All that needs to be done now for that section is for the musicians and designers to be able to sign up for journals, for members to show that they're looking for work, and for the design to be tightened up a little bit, but overall it's almost done.

Some website updates, I've put up an incomplete but functional update to the Sumea Game section. I've decided to put it up because it needs some testing which I can check while other people make use of it. If anyone remembers my plan which I mentioned ages ago on Sumea Newstation, this is pretty much it. It's sorta like GameTab but it's focussing on local game news and blog content. It'll periodically grab the latest rss feeds from a list of news sites and display it, and you can customize the page to show which feeds you want.

It sorta looks ugly at the moment, but it should be working ok. I have two other ideas for the Sumea Game section which I'll be working on the meantime.

Just some more website updates. If it looks like nothing much is happening on the development side of the site for the last month, then you're very much mistaken!

Sumea hangs. I'm sure we've all noticed it now and then. It's a database issue, and I'm terribly embarrassed to mention the name of said database, but this has been a priority of mine to fix for a while now. Unfortunately, it's not a small problem, and I've had to do some major things to get on the right path to fixing it.

So a database upgrade was in order, and I've successfully upsized the Sumea database to SQL Server 2005, and that mostly went ok. Now, I was changing all the asp code on Sumea to use the new database, and it was all progressing fine, until I really needed some more control of the new SQL Server database. I needed to easily backup and restore it in case I messed something up, and I managed to back it up using the database management tools, but I did not have access to the backup file. After an email to my webhost later, they directed me to their sales apartment where I found out that they would charge me something around $130 for them each time to copy that particular file into my ftp directory so that I can download it. Yeh, that's $130 to copy a file over.

After getting over that bit of shock, I went hunting around for another webhost to migrate Sumea to. I found a place called Lunarpages, and joined up and started migrating Sumea over there. Oh, and backing up and restoring the SQL server database? I can do it myself easily and for no cost at all. The new webhost service is great, and I've managed to get most of Sumea up and running with the new database and a tonne of asp code changes. You can't see it yet, but it's being tested at www.sumean.com (some of you may have noticed that the GCAP footage files are hosted there).

So here is where it's at. Everything works, except file uploading, thumbnails creation, and emailing. The new webhost does not have any asp components installed, but they do support the asp.net 2.0 framework which has functionality to upload images, resize them etc

I've been messing a bit with asp.net 2.0, and I'm liking it very much. In fact, I'm planning to completely rewrite Sumea and it's content management system (which I developed since four and a half years ago) using the asp.net 2.0 framework. So this is what I'm planning to do for the next few months.

Also, I've mentioned it in some other threads, but I want to get two art activities happening again on Sumea. We have so many creative talent around these parts, and it's just a shame that we're not doing as much fun art related stuff anymore. So starting soon, we're doing a 3D Sumea Town. We're going to use a special application for this, so keep an eye out for the details soon.

Also, we're having a monthly Sumea Paint activity. Just something simple and fun. At the end of the month, I'll be collecting all the submissions and putting them in a nice gallery for viewing and commenting. Anyway, it'll be fun! I'll be hunting for a new graphics tablet to join in as well.

Bloody good work Souri. Good to have you leading the way. alot of hard work! Its much appreciated. Looking forward to the new sumea, If you need any help organising painting activities Im more then happy in any way

I might call you on that . Although, apart from building the pages to display those submitted pictures and enabling the comments system, there really isn't much else needed.

I mean more so in the concepts, topics and oraganisation of the painting activities rather then the programing side of things. Just an offer, you seem busy enough.

Ok, time for some website updates. I know things seem to be a bit quiet these days on Sumea and I haven't particularly been posting much in the forums, but it's been a real sh*tty last two months for me. I don't mind mentioning it now, but my dad passed away a few weeks ago. He was battling lung cancer and so it's been a hard time to even concentrate on the site for the last two months.

So what has been happening? I've been quietly doing a few things here and there around the site. The first thing you may have noticed is that the forum and the wiki is at our new domain at sumean.com. They've both been migrated to the sql server database, and they're blistering fast.

Second of all, I've been secretly working on sumean.com. Sumean.com will be the sister site to Sumea and will cover general gaming news in Australia and New Zealand. It's not finished yet and there's quite a lot of work left to do, but at the moment, a third of it is complete. So what you'll see there is the news aggregator part of Sumean.com which looks remarkably like the Sumea game section. If you want to check it out, visit sumean.com, but just remember that it's in development stage and I'll be deleting any comments and wiping the database records sometime in the future before launch.

Sorry to hear about your father man, my sympathies, and it's pretty understandable that you've not been feeling up to the task. Hope you're able to get through it.

Looking forward to seeing the new site

Just posting some site news...



It seems like the forum issues have finally been resolved. The forum hasn't gone down for me since the webhost moved the database to a new server which is good. It's been frustrating with all the back and forth with their support about all of this, especially since I knew it wasn't a problem cause by our end.



So I've been thinking a lot about the future of Sumea recently and what more it could do to cater our creative members, and there are a few things that I think would be great to add to the site. Most of them include all the usual social networking stuff / web 2.0 (tagging, friends list etc) everyone seems to be excited about, and while I could implement that in classic asp, it's probably the right time now to redo the site in asp.net. Of course, this means that I have to learn a bit of C# and visual studio as well, but having looked through some books and source, it doesn't seem too scary yet.



Now, this is where content management system packages come in handy, and using / modifying them instead of rewriting everything from scratch seems to be a wiser choice, but having looked around at what's available for asp.net, there really isn't much on offer. On the php platform, you have plenty of options such as joomla and mambo, but on asp.net, you have either dotnetnuke and community server. Dotnetnuke seems to be a bit of a mess and a resource hog, and community server is expensive. I enquired about a license that Sumea needs (we have around 600 members so need the license for unlimited blogs and unlimited galleries), and holy crap, I could buy a really nice new car for the price quoted to me. Plus, I'd imagine it would need to be run on a dedicated server as well because the resources it needs (server memory) would be pretty high. So it looks like I'll be hitting asp.net and C# to see how we go.



Oh, and I've also updated this forum to the latest v9 release. It probably doesn't seem much different to most of you, but there are over 200 fixes in this release and a tiny bit of ajax and other enhancements.

Ok, you know, I can't be screwed making a simple cms in asp.net from scratch, so I've been looking at the only asp.net solution (not counting Community Server) which is Dotnetnuke, and there are problems everywhere. The blog module that comes with it wasn't made for a lot of blogs (maximum of probably a hundred), the forum that comes with it is crap, dotnetnuke sites seem to be painfully slow (asp.net caching times out after 5 to 10 minutes if the site isn't hit, so people have been using online services to schedule visit pages on their site every ten minutes), it's a server resource hog that requires lots of memory and many windows hosts bawk at it, good modules cost money, pain in the ass to set up on my current host, and the list goes on.

Hi there, haven't written an update here in a while.

I've been working through the night the last couple of days to get get some major updates and patches done on tsumea, and have hit a major snag in the process. Hopefully I can sort it out and completed within the next week. The new upgrade means I can implement some new features I have been thinking about for a while now.

Hopefully things will be getting back on track with regular posts on the site once this is all done.

Just got a note from our webhost that we're getting some major dos attacks and what looks like brute force password attacks - I'm guessing it's the spammers hitting the anon comments and Scoop news submissions. The new upgrade will be getting rid of Scoop since I'm pretty tired of dealing with all that.

Ok, had enough of the spammers. Posting Scoops by anyone logged in is disabled. Got tired of deleting their spam and blocking their accounts. Will be putting an alternative way for people to post news on here once we update the site.

Understandable. :)

To throw out a suggestion you could either:

a) Have a time based waiting period before people can post scoops. So if they become a member they have to wait a week before they can post scoops. Most spammers wouldn't bother with it.

b) Have all scoops go through a review process through yourself before they are made publicly posted. There's not a huge posting of scoops so it would be a manageable task.

Reading this thread brings back some memories of the frustrations and triumphs I've experienced through the years of development on Sumea / tsumea so it's great to read back on it. While a lot of the updates I've been implementing on the site in recent times hasn't warranted any new posts in here lately (and I'm not sure if people are curious about it anyway), I feel like writing a few things about how things are currently going and what the new goals are for tsumea.

First of all, spamming has been an enduring problem on the site. I have the commonly used re-captcha system implemented, and that works great, but of course, it won't prevent spam that is put in by real people. 3 or 4 spam posts were slipping through a day, and I got pretty sick of having to remove them. Sure, it only takes 2 clicks to delete each spam post, but as a daily ritual, it is darn annoying. Well, I'm happy to say that I've implemented some triggers to capture most of the remaining spam that manages to slip through, so I've only had to delete two or so spam posts for the last couple of weeks now.

Just checking back, in mid 2007 I decided to get rid of my custom built CMS and migrate everything to another CMS. It was a painful task full of massive headaches and a whole lot of SQL queries, but I'm glad it was completed successfully. The new tsumea was up in early 2008 and I mentioned then that the foundations were in place for when we wanted to expand on what tsumea was all about. Now is the right time to step up to that challenge.

Visitor numbers and readership is still very high, and all the new features implemented (a better categorised and searchable jobs page, a more user friendly game developers listings section, media section, twitter connectivity, news aggregating to other sites) has drawn a lot more visitors. The news items and job ads posted are reaching more people than ever, and I still get some great feedback on the overwhelming response that job posts get on here. However, visitors are not commenting as much to news items and are preferring to lurk instead.

Currently, there are a few issues that I want to tackle head on:

The forum - the forum remains pretty much silent these days
Creatives uploading their work - it has slowed down to a trickle

The issues are mainly community related, and the new work that's being done right now will be aiming to solve all of that. The idea is to open up tsumea to cater international visitors to bring more activity and conversation here, and revitalise the community aspect of tsumea, however, this will mean more than simply creating new forum categories to cater other regions. A whole lot more. I have a plan, and it's a *big* project but I'm working hard on it, and hopefully I'll have something to announce within the next few months.

hey cool, it went live -- great job souri!

It looks like a 1950's american sideshow circus! [:P]

looks great! so im not the only one with sumea as my homepage :P Just a note on my 1024x768 display the top horizontal link.. bar thing (oh god mental blank, sorry for sounding like a fool) gets cut off halfway through the "flashback" text. Everything else is totally solid, good work!

Nice, keep it up please.

Yeh, it's not actually finished, and I thought I'd just put it up since it was too unbearable to look at the css code of the old version and the design buckling due to sponsor logos and other additions.

I've kinda stopped working on the main site and have been fixing the admin section at the moment. Yeh, it's a bit of a mess, but once I'm done it'll be more intuitive, clearer, and cleaner. [:X]

Then I'll have to get onto Sumea creative because that's a bit of a mess as well. Lot of work to do [}:)]

Hopefully you didnt take offense at my comment Souri *blush* I do like it [:)]

looks great , will the forum get an updated theme?

yeah, the forum colours could change to a more nuetral colour, since dark pics contrast heaps with the brighter backgrounds.

quote:Originally posted by HazarD

Hopefully you didnt take offense at my comment Souri *blush* I do like it [:)]

Hey, not at all. It's funny but it never occured to me at all until you mentioned it, but yeh I can absolutely see it looking like it came from an old sideshow circus. [:D]

I think we had this discussion before about the forum background colour and pictures - remember that the forum is mostly used for reading, so if all the posts had a neutral background, people would probably comment that the black text on neutral colour being harder to read.

Good work Souri, that explains why i was unable to access the site on tuesday night.

Does anyone else think the forum button is too far away?

Can you post a screens grab so I can see what you mean.

The site was down for a couple of hours on Tuesday night because the web hosts were having some problems. Their business and support site was down, and I'm sure all their hosted customers sites were inaccessable as well.

The article links aren't working this morning

Ah, right. I could've sworn I tested it. Anyway, it should be fine now.

I think I may have finally found out what was causing the site to go down every once in a while. It was the damn redirection script for all the links in news/games/dev websites. If the site isn't any more stable from now on, then I'm gonna have to hand in my gun and badge.

1280 here. It's probably best to accomodate 1024x768, as that's the most popular size last I checked.

I check every morning before work, and both my resolution at work and at home is 1600*1200, though I would agree on 1280*1024 or 1024*768 for a good average

I'm running dual monitors here at work, 1280x1024 on one screen and 1152x864 on the other. My browsing, email and documentation typically sits on the second monitor (1152x864).

at home I'm 1600x1200 single-screen.

I have no problem with 'annoying' when using smaller screens as long as it's usable. I used to occasionally hit sumea on an old 800x600 lappy and the sponsor's logos covered up the 'Forum' button on the front page's navbar which is the only actual unusable thing about that layout.

1280x1024 here.

At home 1920x1200 (usually windowed to less than 1600x1200), at work 1280x1024 and 1280x960 (dual monitors, usually full screen on the smaller one)

1280x1024 on this monitor, always full screen

Yeh, I always thought people here would be using some huge screen sizes due to most of us primarily being programmers and artists. I know about the sponsor ads overlapping in smaller screen resolutions, and I just have everything fit so well with the new design but in a 1280x1024 or greater resolution. I guess I'll have to add some browser resolution detection script to bump to a lower browser resolution skin whenever 1024x768 and below folk visit.

If you do pick a minimum res it should at least be 4:3 IMO - 1024 x 768 min or 1280 x 960 - not 1280 x 1024 which gives users who are running a 4:3 mode a somewhat stretched picture.

This flows into commenting about artists art paticularly as anyones whose ever drawn a character in 1280 x 1024 then switches to a clean 4:3 mode realises their character is stretched [:O]

For web though, height doesn't really matter. You just get scroll bars if the page is longer than your screen [;)]

I usally go 1024 x 768, but probally go higher when I get a new monitor.

1024*768 here

For work its 1024 x 768 and for home its 1680 x 1050

Ok, thanks for all the replies. I've since invested some more actual thought into things and it should be fine on resolutions above 1024x768.

A lovely redesign Souri! Looks awesome (or "deadly" as Mount Isa residents would say)

Also: Sumea coverage in this month's Atomic. Yet to actually read the article.

well that shocked me when i loaded it up just a second ago. It was normal today at work, and now it's al new and everything. took me a bit to find all the usual sections, but everything is still there, just moved around, which is cool. My only crit is the blue-on-blue 'jobs' and 'what's on' lists, the text is a bit hard to read. needs a little more contrast i think.

Overall i like it, even circus like logo! And the sponsors finally fit somewhere! hazah! (although the vote panel percentages are to far to the right and being obscured, though that could just be my resolution)

Yeh, that's probably the small interview I did with them about the industry.

Anyway, there's still a lot of work to do and there are some glitches here and there which will get ironed out eventually. Trying to get things to work on all browsers in CSS is such a pain. IE is incredibly stupid, and some bugs in Opera are beyond belief (the main page renders properly if you just refresh the page, which makes absolutely no sense). Apart from that, the CSS this time round is much less lamer. [;)]

With the dark blue on light grey that you mention (on Sponsor jobs and Whats on), Livewire, it should be pretty readable? The links that are already clicked should be light blue in colour, so it shouldn't be a problem if they can't be read, because those links are already visited.

The section pages are going through an overhaul too, and the idea is to make that area a whole new subsite called Sumea Creative which caters to members, their journals, creative news and jobs as was suggested before.

Also Redwyre is doing some funky stuff for the gallery, and I'll be making the member journals much better once I get everything else done.

Logos dont appear on mine. Just says "done, but with errors on page" donw the bottom left.
And that link you posted just sends me to that news article but the page is just full of a HEAP of text.

Yeh, you're supposed to read it in your rss feed reader.

Did you receive this recently? The date stamped on the email was the 3/1/2006 which was when everyone else was getting it. That user's account was locked back then, so no one should be receiving spam from meche01.

erk, just cleaning up my spamfiltered email and I guess I ignored that :)

Something else which has only started a few day ago has got me a bit concerned though for the same reasons. Spammers are forging email headers and putting sumea.com.au email addresses in the from/reply to field. I'm getting a tonne of bounced emails around the clock where they've been unsuccessfully delivered, and I shudder to think how many do get through.

Might be time for some scambaiting: [url]http://www.419eater.com/[/url]

Edit: Follow the links too, this scambaiting thing is a huge community, there's lots of other websites like the one above...

pb

ASS uming ???

Nope [:(] I love profanity filters... [:(]

probably the ".org" thing trying to filter out linkage. try "dot org"

or maybe it's a spelling filter too, you misspelled "enetrered"

it was ".org", thanks mcdrewski.

You poor b*stard - how many years is it supporting sumea based on ACCESS???

*boggle* :)

It's handling quite well most of the time, which is what is most surprising about it all.

Anyway, earlier I said I was able to get MySQL going, the database converted, and the site running in no time. The site just needed some adjustments with SQL queries, but I've had some of the important pages changed already.

Getting to the same stage with SQL Server has been an absolute nightmare. The main problem is that I can't successfully convert the database because Access's database upsizer doesn't like something, and the only error message is "Table not converted" or something like that. So I read some hefty whitepaper on why my database won't upsize because that's the only thing I can find on the problem, and it's not even helpful. I can't find a gui front end to see what tables I have successfully coverted because, well, Micosoft wants you to buy their server software which has one, and so everyone else wants to sell you theirs. There's a free web based gui like PHPAdmin, but the site for it is down.

So anyway, I check out the server software, and it looks like Microsoft released SQL Server express edition which is a limited free edition of their SQL server software. Unfortunately, it was released not long ago, and the tools it has are pretty skimp feature-wise and obviously still in testing stage (they call it "community technical preview"), and documentation isn't in an abundance.

Anyway, I'm not a database guy, not even remotely interested in them, but the moral of the story is.. Access -> MySQL = easy. The tools are free and plentiful, and it's all easy. Access -> SQL Server, holy hell on a stick. You'd think Microsoft would make it easier to move up from their own software.

I think I just might ask tech support if they will just remove my SQL server option and put in MySQL instead if I can't get any progress on this.

I "heard someone tell me once" that if you were to find the SQLServer 2000 Evaluation Version then once the SQLServer database component expires you can keep using all the administrative tools (Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer).

Of course Microsoft seems to have deleted all access to that download, but if you were to google +"sqleval.exe", or to PM or email someone that had a copy it might help...

...if you're not using a more recent SQLServer version that is :)

Yeh, I acutally downloaded the old evaluation version specifically for Enterprise Manager, then just deleted it to free up some HD space [:D]

Anyway, SQL Server seems too much of pain that I might just go with MySQL instead.

Yeh, the forum does that for some strange reason. Don't blame me, I have nothing to do with it [:)] I guess the valuable lesson here is to log in to the forum before making a post, or enter your username and password details if you're doing a quick reply.

As for the jpg, did you name it as .jpg or .jpeg?

jpg is the default output from CS2, is that suffix bad?

Here's the jpg I tried to upload

[img]icon_paperclip.gif[/img] Download Attachment: [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/mySpline/200621513758_10k.jpg"]10k.jpg[/url]
7.23 KB

If you use the .jpg suffix, it should upload with no problem, no matter what browser you're using. What error message are you getting?

Hi Souri,

That's the problem, there's no error message when I upload the jpg, it seems to work fine, but my profile jpg doesn't exist.

[url]http://www.sumea.com.au/simages2/p_569.jpg[/url]

I'm clueless...

Ok, I'm a grade a idiot. I had a typo on profile pages so nobody's avatar was showing up properly. You uploaded the files fine, the page was just not pointing to the right pic.

You should be a programmer Souri, we get paid good money to make those kinds of mistakes [:D]

hey, my avatar's not showing up on my page ( http://www.sumea.com.au/sprofile.asp?member=444 ) either - could it be the same bug?

page is trying to reference http://www.sumea.com.au/simages2/p__444.jpg , which doesn't seem to exist.

...and is it possible to show our 'customised' journal colourscheme when linking in directly from the "latest journal entries" links on the front page ( link to http://www.sumea.com.au/sprofilepic.asp?news=1895 ) instead of the default blue?

...and i'm thirsty - do something about that too please

Ah yeh, it's the same typo [:X]

I've made a quick fix so that customised journals will show for journal posts without pictures.

http://www.dmw.com.au/html/careerZone.cfm

is the only one I know. Post is if you find other sites.

The relationship between the games and the film industry is edging closer and closer every year. The talent from both industries are able to cross over (3D artists, animators, concept arts etc) too. We have movie writers, actors etc, taking part in the development of games, and games are starting to require some of the skills that used to be specific to the film industry like shader programmers, and lighting technicians. I always thought games could use the skills of a cinematographer as well. Movies have also been influenced by games too, movies based on games are so common now.

It's probably worth it for Sumea to grow and cover some of the happenings in the film industry because it's a pretty vibrant industry and it's of interest to the creative talent we have here. There are tonnes of incredible special effects/3d animation studios around, and things are really taking off in New Zealand too. So maybe we'll expand to cover that industry in the near future.

btw, I just recently watched the extra disc on the Star Wars III dvd, and I have to say that the craftsmen here for the movie industry are *absolutely* brilliant. There's a bit where George Lucas muttered to the production manager or someone important next to him that to get ILM to change something, ILM would think it over and complain it's too hard, but ask the Australian crew to change something and they go off and do it in 2 seconds. [:)]

I received an email from Jomar at Digital Media World a while ago who was amazed at how far Sumea had come. I had a chat with him about Sumea when the site had just started up 4 or so years ago.

I know this doesn't help much, but there's some mailing list for digital artists for the local film industry which might be helpful. I can't for the life of me remember the details.

Thanks for the link USSMC, but I you misinterpreted my question.

Souri, if that?s the case, do you think Sumea will be making some changes soon about a few things so it doesn?t look like its just for games? (It's already great the way it is dont get me wrong)

quote:Originally posted by Souri
There's a bit where George Lucas muttered to the production manager or someone important next to him that to get ILM to change something, ILM would think it over and complain it's too hard, but ask the Australian crew to change something and they go off and do it in 2 seconds. [:)]

Maybe ILM knew GL would just change his mind again in 3 seconds :)

quote:Originally posted by ninotheSouri, if that?s the case, do you think Sumea will be making some changes soon about a few things so it doesn?t look like its just for games? (It's already great the way it is dont get me wrong)

You know, it's funny that you ask for Sumea to cover the 3D film industry because the site originally started out as a digital artist website. We were covering 3D software news and happenings in the digital art world, and we had artist sections for mappers, 2D artists and modellers, and that was it. If you weren't an artist, you wouldn't have been interested in visiting the site in the early days.

It's taken years for the site to get to this stage where it's seen as an asset to the industry, and I'm sure it'll take a long time and lots of work to get to the same level for the local film industry.

I've been planning to redesign the artists (modeller, mapper, 2d artist) sections into one page and it might be worth making that into a sub site where news, content, and everything is geared towards digital artists.

Anyway, creating the content, finding the news, and building it up is going to take time.

Souri, that sounds really good. I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure people will be happy to help to make it happen faster.

quote:Originally posted by Souri

I'm sure quite a few of the locations I have for developers are incorrect (Redwyre informed me that the location I had for Pandemic Studios pointed to a cafe), so hopefully others will correct whatever else I have wrong.

It now points to a vacant unit [:D]

Are you doing the xml stuff client side or server side?

yeehaw.

Hey, that's the location you gave me for Pandemic. [:o)]

All the Sumea wiki stuff will be server sided. Sumea comments could be client sided, but my javascripting is poor. So unless someone wants to volunteer to do that, I'll do it server sided [;)]

It was valid when I gave it to you ;)

I guess I've already volunteered?

floating point roundoff error. :)

Note also that google maps and google earth disagree by fifty meters or so about things in Brisbane... which is weird.

no coder but just wanted to say the wiki is a great initiative, well done

quote:Originally posted by redwyre

It was valid when I gave it to you ;)

I guess I've already volunteered?

Actually, I'll just do it myself and keep it server sided. What I wanted to get you to do via javascript was to parse the xml, add comment numbers, and add options to change the order of sorting (by date, reverse order etc). I thought that would be a pain in the arse to do, but having looked into it, I've already been able to do all of that with XSL.

http://www.sumea.com.au/include/zxmltest.asp
http://www.sumea.com.au/include/zn1.xml
http://www.sumea.com.au/include/zn1.xsl

So anyway, I should get this up real soon after I convert the thousands of comment files into xml format and change the Sumea comments code again to write xml [:X]

After that I'll be looking into putting in the ability for people to reply to certain messages and have it display under it (rather than having people refer to comments by their comment number). Anyway, I'm an xml convert. It's really cool [:)]

Just an update on this, I've completed converting all the comments into xml format, and Sumea comments reads/writes it all out in xml. Amazingly, you won't tell the difference anyway [;)]. You'll also find an rss link so you can bookmark any news item/gallery picture/vote/profile comment etc. I don't think I'll put in the functionality to insert comments under other comments.

Is it just me, or is the wiki busted?

think it's just you. works fine for me.

Yeh, I updated the wiki software. Unfortunately, the new wiki had some stylesheet format changes so it borked at my old stylesheet which was suited for the previous version.

I got that too!

Likewise.

and me :(

same, probably went out to all memebers

quote:Originally posted by LiveWire

same, probably went out to all memebers

If so that's one dedicated spammer. It would be a lot of stuffing about to send something to everyone on sumea unless you are Souri wouldn't it?

I wonder what a suitable punishment is? :)

yay! me too, I fee special....LAME!!

Just to make that jerks email address a bit clearer and make sure he gets some spam it is doujey05@yahoo.fr

Yeh, I got it too. What ever you do, for goodness sakes, please don't reply to that email. They sent it via the Sumea forum, the forum never reveals anyone's email address to anyone except forum administrators, so spammers will have no idea what your email address is.

Snitz isn't as popular or widely used forum as phpbbs, vBullettin etc, so we've fared pretty well with spammer attacks, but it's a bit concerning to see them making successful inroads into the forum. I get a tonne of bounced emails from failed registration attempts from spammers who trying registering with an invalid email account though.

If this spammer didn't use a script or program to automate the process and sent it one-by-one to each member, then I would say that he'd be the lamest spammer in the known universe. [;)]

I've locked his account, and if anyone gets anymore like that in the future, please post about it in this thread.

damn so i'm really not going to score $3.5 million??? =I =D

nothing new, just chalk one more up for me too.

Souri, you've done a great job keeping the spam and harvesting pretty minimal, so cheers [:)]

heh, the email account that this forum is registered too i dont even use anymore (my main page account email is current though) because its so bogged with spam anyway so i havent been botherd :P Thanks for doing your best to keep us spam free though!

Souri: that spammer IS lame. Picking a forum full of computer nerds to try a scam like that Nigerian thing a while back is not very bright [:)]

Ah, I see I was not the only one to get this one.

You know, if I ever meet one of these spammers, I am going to beat them to death with a keyboard. I won't be at all angry about it either, just nice and calm as I bash their head in and then watch them bleed to death from severe head trauma ;). After all, I would be doing a public service ;).

I wonder if anyone would be ever stupid enough to admit they were one though...

Bleurgh, it seems like a tonne of people have received it. I got a few emails from some curious forum members who thought this email was on the behalf of Sumea, and I can understand the confusion because the email headers say the email came here (yeh, it was sent from the forum mailer, and not spoofed).

But just to re-iterate, what this spammer did wasn't anything clever. He simply registered onto the forum with a valid Yahoo address, went to the memberlist and sent an email to each forum member, which Sumea sends. So yeh, the spammer selected the member, pasted his spam message, clicked send, and then went to the next member to do it again. This would've taken hours and hours, and unless he had this automated somehow (which he most likely did), would've been absolutely mind numbing work.

I'll look into putting in measures so this doesn't happen again, but from the top of my head, the easiest solution would be putting a check in the send email page to see if the forum member has at least been registered for a certain ammount of time before they can send an email.

And yeh, I can't believe this idiotic spammer is even trying that old and very, very tired Nigerian 419 scam - I mean, you can tell straight away when they're offering to investments or need a place to to safe guard a huge fortune. They'll try to get you to disclose your bank account details, and of course, before they can make the transfer, they'll need you to pay some fees or money for bribes to help them out etc [:o)].

What about the now-standard "type these numbers in a box" method? You could use it on the comments as well, I'm sure it would eliminate spam almost completely.

Lorien: I doubt the spammer did any "picking" other than choosing some sites out of a google search. Then they probably just typed it into some "spam-4-u" program and it mailed everyone in the database (it's quite simple, just a url and sequential ids)

velocity checking might help. no more than five messages in each hour per account?

This is his ip address if anyone wants to look it up XD

81.199.125.5

Meh. a dialup block in the ivory coast. dead end.

quote:
% This is the RIPE Whois query server #2.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% Note: the default output of the RIPE Whois server
% is changed. Your tools may need to be adjusted. See
% http://www.ripe.net/db/news/abuse-proposal-20050331.html
% for more details.
%
% Rights restricted by copyright.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/copyright.html

% Note: This output has been filtered.
% To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag

% Information related to '81.199.124.0 - 81.199.127.255'

inetnum: 81.199.124.0 - 81.199.127.255
netname: CIDR-AROBASE-1
descr: Arobase Telecom
country: ci
admin-c: KR451-RIPE
tech-c: BN537-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA "status:" definitions
mnt-by: AS12491-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

person: Kouassi Remi
address: Rue du commerce, Plateau
address: 01 BP 6944 Abidjan 01
address: C.te d'ivoire
phone: +225 2031 0090
e-mail: remi.kouassi@arobasetelecom.ci
nic-hdl: KR451-RIPE
source: RIPE # Filtered

person: Brou N'guessan Baudouin
address: Rue du commerce, Plateau
address: 01 BP 6944 Abidjan 01
address: C.te d'ivoire
phone: +225 2031 0090
e-mail: baudouin.brou@arobasetelecom.ci
nic-hdl: BN537-RIPE
source: RIPE # Filtered

% Information related to '81.199.124.0/22AS34126'

route: 81.199.124.0/22
descr: Arobase, Cote d'Ivoire
origin: AS34126
mnt-by: AS12491-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

Although not the direct goal of the nigerian scam, it has gone far enough in a few cases where other "opportunities" have arisen which have resulted in more than a number of kidnappings/ransoms and at least one known death. People have been gullible and naive enough to pay for their own transport to a foriegn country and become easy targets.

[img]http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/hmmklord/misc/yarr.gif[/img]
I agree wit' this 'ere sentiment!
'Appy New 'ear to all ye landlubbers.

*wanders off to find some grog*

Happy New Year for tonight, folks [:)] You know it's the festive season when all your email spam starts off with "Merry Christmas" or "Happy New Year" XD

2006 is going to be an awesome year for games (I'm looking forward to Unreal Tournament 2007 and ET: Quake Wars).

I will be thinking yas while I'm getting trampled and pushed around by the hordes of other party goers at Bondi [:o]

Yeh, Happy New Years to all Sumeans!

My New Year's resolution is to post here as much as I used to. [:p]

Happy new years everyone!!! Im definetly looking forward to all this year has to hold. Bring on first year uni!!! :D oh and fireworks are awesome, how the barges dont blow up i dont know (was right infront of one).

viva la revolution!