ErikH2000
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We are transitioning to a new set of forum pages. You can access the same forum from either the old URL:

http://drod.net/forum

...or the new one:

http://forum.caravelgames.com

In a month or so, the old URL will just redirect you to the new one, but for now they both work. So at your leisure, you should try out the new URL and post about anything that looks broken. You may need to reupload your avatar. Also, if you have your browser set to selectively allow cookies on some sites, be sure to allow cookies on caravelgames.com. Also also, attached pictures that are inlined in posts may need to be edited so that they point to the new URL.

For the technocrats out there, here's what's going on: A second and separate set of web pages are installed at the new location and they have been edited so they always reference the new URL. This set of pages accesses the same database as the old set, so the "two" forums should never be out-of-sync.

drod.net is also planned to move to http://drod.caravelgames.com and that will be the player site for DROD. We might have other non-DROD games in the future, and they'd get similiar subdomains, i.e. "pacman.caravelgames.com" (but not PacMan, because we'd be getting sued!).

Is this the death of DROD.net? Yes and no. The domain name is going to be gradually phased out, with redirects from the drod.net pages. Obviously, we aren't getting rid of the forum or all the content on DROD.net, so hyperbole aside, we didn't really kill DROD.net after all. Phew!

Why are we doing this? Four reasons really:

1. I think it looks a bit confusing and unprofessional to have the two separate domain names. Particularly when we are running CaravelNet and its online services from "drod.net".

2. Cookies can be shared on the "caravelgames.com" domain. So if you log in on the forum, we can keep your logged-in status to use for other features if you are on the company or player sites.

3. I like having the possibility of using separate subdomains for other non-DROD games in the future.

4. I don't actually own the "drod.net" domain. Jean-Michel of TLK does, and he manages it on my behalf. He's been completely reasonable to work with, but I want to own my domain, and I don't feel like hassling him to transfer the domain over to me.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

RoboBob3000
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I uploaded my avatar at forum.caravelgames.com and I'm getting red x'ed.

____________________________
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Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5383
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RoboBob3000 wrote:
I uploaded my avatar at forum.caravelgames.com and I'm getting red x'ed.

Could you try it again now?

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Alneyan
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 622
Registered: 07-06-2004
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Rejoice! The bar still works fine on the "new" site! We should not overlook the great tragedy that has occurred today, though. We shall never condone violence, let alone murder in cold blood, even if it involves domain names. Whatever offences it might have committed, surely drod.net did not deserve the capital punishment. We will be demonstrating tomorrow in Seattle against this particularly heinous crime and... *Steps off the soapbox*

We might have other non-DROD games in the future, and they'd get similiar subdomains, i.e. "pacman.caravelgames.com" (but not PacMan, because we'd be getting sued!).

Can you say rumour-mongering? See, I have a nifty idea of a game, involving blocks and lines. You rotate blocks with this key, drop them like that, and they all disappear when you make one or several blocks. Since all blocks are made up of four tiles, I thought about calling the game Tetrus, but my marketing director advised me to go for Tetris instead. Interested?

I'll be quiet now, so stop hitting me. Please.

RoboBob3000
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Schik wrote:

RoboBob3000 wrote:
I uploaded my avatar at forum.caravelgames.com and I'm getting red x'ed.

Could you try it again now?

Still nothing. And I can't see Erik's either.

____________________________
http://beepsandbloops.wordpress.com/

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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RoboBob3000 wrote:
Still nothing.

One more try? This time I'm pretty sure it's fixed.

On a somewhat related note, uploading larger images than we support should work better now - the downsampling will be much better than it used to be.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

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[Last edited by Schik at 11-29-2005 08:21 PM]

RoboBob3000
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Rank Points: 1978
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Bingo.

____________________________
http://beepsandbloops.wordpress.com/

jamie
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 365
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Don't forget to add a favicon.ico

And, I assume with the new url naming scheme, any other games you decide to create forum space for will use the same forum as this one ?

____________________________
#f3i2g# Disclaimer: I'm Welsh, left-handed, and stupid. #f3i2g#

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[Last edited by jamie at 11-29-2005 11:35 PM : fixed typo]

ErikH2000
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Yes, as far as I can predict, we'd use the same forum for any games other than DROD. That's part of the reason for giving it a subdomain ("forum.") separate from the player site ("drod.").

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Alneyan
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 622
Registered: 07-06-2004
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Erik, is that you? I'm sure it isn't so. Step to red alert! Someone has hijacked Caravel, they have killed Erik, and... bzstrssss. Nevermind. The situation is now under control. Biiiiiip.

I suspect December will be an interesting month. Should this prevision go wrong... well, remember that I didn't specify which December I was talking about.

kie
Level: Master Delver

Rank Points: 221
Registered: 02-26-2005
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Errm, has larrymurk's avatar put on weight or is that something to do with the new way of uploading 'larger' images on the new url ???

____________________________
cheers, kie

trick
Level: Legendary Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2580
Registered: 04-12-2003
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It's because off-site avatars are resized to 60x60 in the html code. It seems drod.net/forum is considered off-site when you're browsing from forum.caravelgames.com, and vice versa.

- Gerry

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[Last edited by trick at 11-30-2005 12:41 AM : vice versa valiantly verified]

Swivel
Level: Master Delver

Rank Points: 236
Registered: 09-14-2005
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My two greckles:

1. Hopefully, the new website will be the first Google result for DROD is the future. Understandably, this will take some time.

2. Meanwhile, redirects would be a good thing.

3. I noticed that on the DROD Wikipedia page, the forum link is missing. Should I (or someone else) put the new forum's link in?

... more random comments ...

13. Perhaps the new link should be at the top of the DROD.net page. "We're moving; visit us at..."

14.

ErikH2000 wrote:
This set of pages accesses the same database as the old set, so the "two" forums should never be out-of-sync.

Good! When I'm done posting I'll go over to DROD.net to see if that's true.

15. DROD.net isn't being killed... let's think of it as assisted suicide.

16. The source for all of the attachments has changed (from www.drod.net/forum/getattachment.php?id=4242 to forum.caravelgames.com/getattachment.php?id=4242), but the links within the posts themselves have not. For example, the internally linked images don't show up on the kitten thread. Changing this may be tedious.

17. Note that forum.caravelnet.com doesn't automatically create a link (compared with www.drod.net).

19. I like the "under construction" page for the new DROD site. Spiffy!

20. I look forward to the change.

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5383
Registered: 02-04-2003
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I've fixed all of the avatars uploaded to our server, so that they point at the new address. If you notice any I missed, let me know and I'll fix them.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Krishh
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 282
Registered: 06-05-2004
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A small issue:

The new forum doesn't have that page icon that the old one had, and it was quite comfortable to get to the forum from page history without reading through it.

Mattcrampy
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2388
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It can be revived reasonably easily, it's just a favicon on the server and a few settings to say which domain it applies to.

____________________________
What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

Tim
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1979
Registered: 08-07-2004
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The "this page" link on the new forum Holds board, leads to a blank page.

-- Tim

____________________________
The best way to lose customers is to let little kids running loose on a forum with too many mod points.

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5383
Registered: 02-04-2003
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Tim wrote:
The "this page" link on the new forum Holds board, leads to a blank page.

Thanks, fixed.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3626
Registered: 10-06-2005
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drod.net still links to drod.net/forum. But I don't think that'll end up being too much of a problem, drod.caravelgames.com will probably link to forum.caravelgames.com when it's built.

____________________________
Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

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Registered: 07-05-2004
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Schik wrote:

Tim wrote:
The "this page" link on the new forum Holds board, leads to a blank page.

Thanks, fixed.

Speaking about the holds page, the contact link at the bottom has pretty weird address. It seems to work on other pages.

Am I missing something or is there any way to access the caravelnet exclusive part of the downloads page at the moment? I can't get the downloads to appear. I don't need anything from there. Just being curious.

gamer_extreme_101
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Caravel downloads work perfectly fine for me on http://forum.caravelgames.com/downloads.php. The contact address on the bottom is screwed up, but it'll be replaced anyways. No worries, no worries.

____________________________
--That guy with a million different aliases since he doesn't like this name anymore.

Doom
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Yeah, that downloads page works. (I was at the old one...) I couldn't find a link to it and didn't think about writing it myself.

Well, that won't be a problem when the drod.caravelgames address is working.

DiMono
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If you go to drod.net and click the link in the front page to caravelgames.com, it just loads white in to the content pane rather than visiting a site.

____________________________
Deploy the... I think it's a yellow button... it's usually flashing... it makes the engines go... WHOOSH!

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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DiMono wrote:
If you go to drod.net and click the link in the front page to caravelgames.com, it just loads white in to the content pane rather than visiting a site.

For me it loads the caravelgames.com site into the content pane. I think it should go to _top instead of the content pane, but if we can get the new site pushed out there soon, then it won't matter.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Tim
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The newest member link on the main forum page doesn't work. (I haven't tested all the links, but this one doesn't work.)

Oh, and the Member List Page looks as it is not resized properly.

Oh, the last time I accepted a beta hold lead me to a 404 page.

____________________________
The best way to lose customers is to let little kids running loose on a forum with too many mod points.

Alneyan
Level: Smitemaster
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Some links on the CaravelNet website still point to the old URLs. In particular, CaravelNet has the old URL for the High scores page, and Room Help (from the help files) point to the old URL for the forum.

I have also seen an URL for drod.net, but since the new site isn't up yet, it might be too early to change that. Speaking of which, a redirection (or a link to the old website) might be nice on drod.caravelgames.com, so that nobody gets lost.

I also run into the dreaded 404 error when clicking "Discuss this article" on news on the website.

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[Last edited by Alneyan at 12-12-2005 11:55 AM]

eytanz
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In the challenges forum, the roach icons are broken for me. I don't remember when the last time I saw them was, but it was probably before the transition.

____________________________
I got my avatar back! Yay!

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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eytanz wrote:
In the challenges forum, the roach icons are broken for me. I don't remember when the last time I saw them was, but it was probably before the transition.

Fixed. Thanks.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Watcher
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Minor detail that seems to have gone unnoticed: the notice at the bottom of every page still says "Enhanced by the tForumHacks team and the DROD.net team.".

Edit: Also, when I posted this message, I was hit by an off-by-one bug that I think has popped up before. After posting the 30th post (29th reply) in a thread, you'll be redirected to page 2 of the thread, which doesn't have any posts yet. So you get a nearly empty page.

____________________________
Today the refrigerator, tomorrow the world!

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[Last edited by Watcher at 12-18-2005 10:15 PM]

Schik
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Watcher wrote:
Minor detail that seems to have gone unnoticed: the notice at the bottom of every page still says "Enhanced by the tForumHacks team and the DROD.net team.".

Whew... this important detail has been fixed.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi