The Dink Network

I'm gone for just a few days and I see 7 new articles in the news! I've never seen the Dink Network so active! Is everyone sick with an activity bug or something?

What would be really ironic here is if nobody replied to this post.

Yeah, it totally would.

oh well, too late now.

Speaking of activity on the site whateva happened to the contests...did redink shut them down because of inactivity or no one signing up or whut???

There is a reason, but I am not going to tell you.

TDN went down two months ago, now it has come to its former activity

Well it's far more activity than I have seen since joining late November/early December last year.

Well that's good to hear now isn't it

Indeed it is, my friend.

Ya...when I was on the Dink network before it went out for two months this was about the level of activity. Though this place has lots of new members equal to the daily members before...a lot of the old daily members from before the great two-month gameshe dog blackout have gone missing. Considering how often some of them visited I can only guess they havent come back, because they've forgotten about this place after not coming back for a month. Can we get someone dedicated to send emails to these people just to get them to come back? Im sure they'd have a relapse and become re-aDink'did.

I remember and havent seen:

-Drake
-MTG
-Christiaan
-Safmoor
-Kory (thank God)
-Rusted Sorrow

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

safmoor was here recently in the "ghosts..." thread. I thought I saw Christiaan not long ago, but I could be wrong.

Every one of the people you've mentioned have logged in since the Great Server Outage of Ofer. And I think a few have posted and/or reviewed.

With one exception, each one has posted since the Server Outage of Woe and Despair.

User/Last Post:

Drake/Jan. 25
MTG/Jan. 3
Christiaan/Feb. 28 (today!)
Safmoor/Feb. 24
Kory/Jan. 24
RustedSorrow/Nov. 21

Ah yes, the search function does many great things. Anyway, some people simply aren't as active as they once were (me, for example). But have no fear, for we're all still around.

Well, maybe you should fear, as we do look quite similar to that certian fungal growth...

Oh yeah. I've got a better title for this thread:

"Inconceivable!"

I don't post or visit the site all that often because I can catch up within a a month's events on TDN (forum or otherwise) within half an hour.

This site is in my opinion more a life then other Dinkforums.

The one on the Dinkworld and the RTsoft sites do not have many new topics. And there are not as many replies as this one.

Great Server Outage of Ofer

Its stuff like that that makes Redink1 such a great writer. I hope in years I can tell the newbs about the great outage like a revered elder.

What caused it anyway?

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

I left. Driven mad with grief, the server resolved to stop working until I returned. Lucky for this community, I did, and everything was good again.

All hail Valoveer yee with so much self confidence

This is pure speculation, but reasonable speculation:

After IGN and Gamespy merged, all of the Gamespy employees that we dealt with from time-to-time got the axe, and were replaced by their IGN equivalents.

The Gamespy guys knew what was going on with the systems that they designed, while the IGN guys did not have a clue.

Cue hack. Severe hack. All of the dynamic servers (I think there were 5 or 6) were compromised. All data could be read or modified at will. The hackers had full access for at least a month.

One of the IGN guys looked up from his usual task of watching porn, realized that they'd been hacked, said "Oh shoot," and spilled coffee over his crotch. He was hospitalized for severe swelling, and was eventually divorced because his wife found out about the porn he watched at work. Not the fact that it was porn, but the fact that it was Barney the Purple Dinosaur Porn.

Cue shut down.

The IGN guys, not understanding anything about the current system, decide to re-build the dynamic servers from scratch. They thought this would only take a week or two.

But, the IGN guys forgot that they were incompetent, and so the process took over a month. Shortly after the servers were back up, and *just* after we moved, they decided to block all Perl access because they did not set up the servers in a secure manner. As The Dink Network runs on Perl scripts that I've designed, I would either have to re-design everything in PHP (something that would not be feasible) or move to a different host anyway.

Either that, or we had a run around by a BOFH clone.