In light of Wizards shutting down their community discussion boards, we have decided to re-open our own community forums.
We invite you all to visit The Arena, where we will discuss all things Athasian, and related. (Some among you may remember that this is not our first arena; the software we are using for this iteration should be better supported than what we were using the first time around.)
One of our first orders of business will be to work on recovering what we can from the Wizards forums before they are shut down at the end of October; see the WotC Forum Recovery category for more information, and how you can help.
After talking with some of the other staff at athas.org, I’ve decided to close the arena.
The code for the arena is based on a dead forum project; even when it was alive, the hacks that I made to enable single signon made things very difficult to keep up to date. Because of this, it’s become a drain on server resources, and has actually made it more difficult to keep other aspects of the site up to date.
Considering that the traffic on the arena numbers in the single digit posts-per-month range, I think it’s best put into mothballs.
While I’m going to be removing the site soon, I will be saving the database; if there’s a demand for it, I’ll see about setting up a read-only archive of the site.
Once the arena is removed, I’ll be undertaking some infrastructure modernization efforts – Some visible, some behind the scenes. I’ll talk more about that later.
So, I finally managed to get around to getting the arena back online. It’s the same codebase that was there previously, though I’m going to be doing some work on modernizing it as time allows.
The link is back, but the DNS changes may take a day or so to propogate; if you cant’t get there yet, you will soon.
After a series of unfortunate server outages due to a compromised web server, we’re finally back up online, albeit in a somewhat diminished capacity. I’ve got most sections of the site back and recovered, but there are some older feedback type areas of the site – which were generally swamped by spam – that I’ve disabled during the course of cleaning out the system.
I’ve also yet to re-enable the arena, and I am, to be honest, uncertain as to wether or not I am going to do so. As I mentioned on the wizard’s forum I’m uncertain as to wether or not I’m going to go to the extent of reviving them. That forum thread is probably the best place to give feedback, although you can also email me if you feel strongly about it.
So, I finally managed to get to the bottom of the problems with the arena login. Those of you who have been having problems logging into the arena should be good now. If you’re still having issues, contact me directly and I’ll see if I can fix it.
Post-mortem? It was a problem validating new records added to the arena application by my jury-rigged Single Signon patch.
