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Found 3 results

  1. Hey, everyone! Looks like it's time for our first forum announcement of 2023! As you may or may not have noticed, our website and forums were offline for a few hours there - you might have even seen a 500 Internal Server Error or some other wild HTTP error. You might even have noticed that things seem a bit... different. Or maybe not. Either way, let's get into it and figure out just what exactly was going on today - as well as some other goodies. Minecraft - New Hub and Factions Removal First and foremost - for those of you who aren't part of our Discord, we've made a couple updates to the MC server. First, we've updated our hub once again to something a bit less festive. Yes, I know - it's a bit late, but hey - better late than never, right? The new hub isn't just our previous non-festive hub, however. It's actually the Christmas hub thawed out. Now you might be thinking, isn't that what the previous one was? Well, not quite. The original version of the hub was much more enclosed in the immediate spawn area. At first, we thought this was fine. However, if you recall our previous post talking about inviting some outside help, this is one thing that became a bit more clear to me after getting the feedback from them (more details on that later). The key issue was simple: having the entire hub be enclosed and claustrophobic wasn't exactly inviting to new players. At first, I planned to resolve this by having a brand new hub created - professionally. And while I did pay for a new hub to be professionally built, we almost certainly won't be using it (again, more details later on). However, when first creating the Christmas hub, I had the idea to open up the top - partially to have a way for snow to get in, but also a way to just help things feel more breathable. Upon doing so, things immediately felt a fair bit better - and so I decided to take this updated version of the hub and use that as the base for the new hub. For the most part, it's about the same as the Christmas hub, just without any snow or ice or Christmas lights. A few other minor improvements have been made, however, including: Detailed Building Interiors - The majority of the buildings (though not all just yet) have proper, detailed interiors - they aren't just empty buildings! Redesigned Holograms - We've basically been using the same copy/pasted holograms for the past 7-8 years - and another point of feedback from my outside source was that things overall felt outdated - and not in a good way. Looking at the holograms again, I did find myself thinking that they could use some touch-ups. The initial welcome hologram has been rewritten, and some minor stylistic changes have been made to all other holograms. These changes do NOT apply to previous hubs, of course - so feel free to compare directly if you like. Some previously unfinished areas have been finished A few small new areas have been added throughout the explorable areas. See what you can find! Factions Yes, the title is true unfortunately. With the update to 1.19.3, the Factions plugin we found had stopped working properly - and there was no update. In other words, to replace it would result in all existing faction data being lost. This, combined with the complete lack of players on Factions, caused us to end up shutting factions down outright - as there just wasn't a point in bothering at that point. Upon reflection, it seems as though part of this stems from the fact that most in the community just aren't the type to get joy from griefing or destroying other people's stuff. Maybe that's wrong, but even when our Vanilla server was setup to allow griefing, nobody did - people instead just did what they do now, play survival, largely leaving other people alone except when directly working together. Will Factions ever return? If there's popular demand, sure. But the other thing Factions needs is a solid playerbase from the start. In other words, it likely won't be something that gets introduced for some time, not until we start getting solid playercounts on the other gamemodes. Outside Help - The Results As mentioned earlier, I had gotten in contact with someone in order to get some outside aid - which turned from "let's start advertising" to "let's get this ancient server up with the times". Since that previous post, I have indeed gotten the document. Or more specifically, documents - one for each gamemode. Each one was fairly more thorough than I expected, including visual aids and stuff like that. For the most part, a lot of the suggested changes are reasonable. In some cases, the ideas include stuff I've thought of myself - or even stuff we used to have before. While I currently won't go into a ton of detail, nor will I promise that anything listed below will definitely 100% happen, the key suggestions that we're currently considering going along with and introducing include: Additional NPC Usage - Essentially, having more NPCs used for a variety of purposes - such as links, shops, etc. Tab Menu Updates - Nothing too significant would be done here, just having some minor additions to the tab menu besides just regular statistics. Survival Shop - This is one of those that we used to have back in the day, an official server shop in Survival. We ditched it primarily because it de-incentivized the creation of player shops. While this is still a concern for us, we hope to be able to balance it a bit better should we decide to introduce it again. Jobs - Another feature we used to have, and (somewhat) recently at that. It was removed both due to it having some pretty serious issues (at least with how we had it configured) where it'd issue far too much reward. When we tried to fix it, it actually started awarding negative amounts of money - in other words, you would actually lose money by progressing through a given job. Ouch. These issues would have to be remedied before we introduced it to Survival again. Additional Playtime Rewards - Many years ago, we introduced "Time-Based Ranking", or as it's currently known as by the plugin we use for it, Autorank. This was a way to allow ranks to be obtained not just via real-world cash (or "donations"), but by simply playing for a while. This is cool and all, but currently it's the only thing you get for straight playtime. One thing we'd like to do is introduce additional types of rewards for a certain repeating amount of playtime, such as a secondary global currency. What we're thinking of doing here is finally introducing "CUPoints", a planned universal currency that would be earned via certain minigames - though in its original implementation, it was very easy to burn through parkour maps and rack up massive amounts of points. Additionally, there was never any form of store to actually use those points. Things will be a bit different this time around - and they'll probably be called something else, too. The original name was just derived from NDPoints, a similar type of secondary currency found on NuclearDistrict's MC server - the name we're currently thinking of is just "Tokens". A bit generic perhaps, but sounds a bit better in our opinion than CUPoints. Additional Crates - We've had the single "VoteCrate" for a long time, however the crate does have its limits. Primarily, the fact that there's just one crate. What we're thinking of doing is expanding the crate selection, and making use of the Tokens system described above - issuing 1 per vote - and allowing the user to choose what type of crate key they want. Better keys would be more expensive, but this way you'd have a great deal more control than just a single crate and hoping for the best. We'll probably keep the current crate as it is currently and have it be worth 1 key, but have some other additional goodies and some "guaranteed good item" crates for a larger amount of tokens. Some things have actually already started to make their way in - we recently introduced a default scoreboard in most gamemodes that shows various statistics and information, depending on the gamemode, along with the redesigned holograms found in the hub. As a side note: if you aren't a fan of the default scoreboards, you can in fact turn them off per-gamemode using /sb toggle. This was a hard requirement for me to introduce the feature to begin with - as I figured there'd be a number of people for whom the scoreboard is just annoying and distracting, or even intrusive depending on the player's GUI scale and/or resolution. Note that the above changes described aren't all that was suggested. There were other things proposed as well, however we aren't currently certain if or how we want to pursue those other changes. Some of them sound interesting, but could potentially do more harm than good. Others (though to be clear, very few others) are ones that we internally disagree with - such as having customizable rank prefixes (as in, your rank prefix could be literally anything for a certain in-game price), and replacing portals to switch gamemodes with NPCs. The NPC thing is an interesting idea, and one that I won't entirely rule out as a secondary alternative. However, one thing that I can guarantee is that our use of portals isn't going anywhere. To me, and to others, it conceptually makes a lot more sense to enter a portal and be transported somewhere, rather than effectively walking up to some dude and magically being warped somewhere. The Paid Hub Oh, right - I almost forgot! I paid for a professionally built hub! And it was pretty much a waste of money. I'm not going to name the builder or the group they belong to, for obvious reason - as I don't entirely put fault on them. Rather, I think it's just that what I expect out of a hub, and what the "typical" modern day MC hub contain and look like aren't necessarily aligned. At first glance, I thought it was decent - however, upon having nearly every person who saw it tell me all the ways they didn't like it, and looking deeper at it myself, the general list of complaints include: Too much strange block palette use - The build has a lot of areas that use a variety of weird and unconventional blocks. The general aesthetic was a tropical island type thing, and the giant palm trees had bark made of a bunch of weird blocks. Most of the beaches were not just made of sand, but also included birch planks. The terrain underwater had the majority of it made up of different wood types - seeming to try to add some additional layering/depth. Lack of explorability - Unlike many of our hubs thus far, there was virtually nothing in terms of secrets to find, and not many ways to really explore. The only secrets were two things I explicitly requested - the inclusion of the classic space shuttle from old CU, and a Nuclear District tribute room. That's it. One thing that was cool, however, was being able to climb to the top of each and every cliff. What's less cool is that that was made possible by me adding vines in, and that out-of-the-box, this was not possible at all. Too much "smoke and mirrors" - Similar to the above point, there's certain parts of the build that are clearly not intended to be seen up-close. The biggest example of this was the variety of buildings. There's a whole town on this little remote island, except every single building, minus the information building and the ND tribute building, are fake. They have no interior, and they don't even have normal doors - opting instead for large black voids that are quite a bit larger than a normal Minecraft door. Most buildings are sized and shaped in such a way that you couldn't even easily add an interior, without completely reshaping and resizing the entire building. Strange areas that come across as incomplete and undetailed - Most of the build is reasonably well detailed, but the primary example of where that isn't the case is underwater - it's just a super smooth hill thing that doesn't have much detail to it, and there's nothing even under the water in terms of plants, rocks, or anything like that - just basic hilly-looking terrain (once again, made of wood - see the first point in case you skipped past that part). If you're curious as to why these issues are even issues, check the spoiler below - I wrapped it in the spoiler tag because it ended up being a fairly wordy explanation, and it's something that, while important, may be something a lot of you folk already know about to some extent. And so, to come back to the paid hub - with the issues it had, we opted to just ditch it, and eat the cost, and simply not use it. However, that doesn't mean that we're just nuking it, or that we'll never use parts of it here or there. One thing we've done is added it to the hub archives - if you'd like to explore this hub in-person, just do /warp hub_2023. Website Changes Alright - at long last, let's discuss those website changes. For a long time (about 11 years, in fact), there's been this separation between the "main website" and the "forums". During the old CU days, they had a period of time where their homepage was actually a proper portal, integrated with the forums - it was virtually seamless. However, later on in the old CU's run, they changed back to a separate homepage - and that trend continued throughout the rest of CU's life, through all of ND's life, and through all of the new CU's life. Until today. Something that we've been gradually doing is replacing the old "main website" pages with redesigned pages that both look better, and are built using the forums' technology. This has been an ongoing project for quite some time - it started with the helpcenter, then the about section, then the different pages for each server's information, and most recently a couple leftover pages from the old helpcenter - and finally, now, the homepage. The redesigned homepage contains a number of improvements. Besides a nice facelift, it shows several recent news posts and has a better display for the different servers - including their IPs within each server's block rather than on the old info sidebar block. Additionally, much of the text - including the about text on the homepage which for a long time has just been copy/pasted and slightly altered/expanded text that dates back to the Nuclear District about pages from 2015/2016. A lot of stuff in there was poorly written, and was inaccurate in some cases - for instance, stating that we are continuously exploring options for new gameservers. For better or for worse, we've been primarily Minecraft focused for many years now - and that isn't changing anytime soon. The layout is otherwise mostly the same, with the other obvious improvement being the updated "proceed" section at the bottom. Most immediately, it's split in half showing options for both Forums and Discord - since a lot of activity nowadays is on Discord, it seems kind of silly to not showcase that on the homepage. Along with that, both sections have nice background images - like it was originally supposed to on the previous homepage. The basic idea was actually inspired from the very first ND homepage, fun fact. The one major technical change this required was moving the forums installation out of the /forums subfolder and into the root of the website directory. This means that, among other things, stuff like the downloads section, about pages, and everything else that it isn't the literal forums won't have the /forums prefix anymore. We've taken care to ensure that the majority of old links still redirect properly, since a lot of stuff is configured in a way that depends on those old links working - and of course any old bookmarks or links on pages or anything else like that needs to keep working too. However, this isn't the end of the old main website - at least, not entirely. It's the end of it being used as CU's main website, but it's not just going into the void to never be seen again. It has instead simply been relocated to a new home. The (very early work-in-progress) Chaotic United Archives Currently, the old website as it was just before the migration can be seen at https://archive.chaoticunited.net/main_website/. Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is have something similar to what we have setup for Nuclear District - except bigger and better. First and foremost, it's gonna be the permanent home of the old main website as it existed until today. Down the road, however, we'll be restoring all the old versions of the main website - allowing you to go through and revisit the site through each major update and redesign. But that's not all. We also plan to reintroduce older versions of the forums - mainly, the final copy of the forums prior to updating to IPB4 and prior to the Nuclear District merge. Even though the merge was only about a year long, it was during that merge that we started to begin to develop a bit more understanding of keeping things professional-looking. As such, I'll be restoring one of those old backups and putting it up for viewing. Eventually, I want to also extend that back to old CU stuff as well - which will likely involve rebuilding a lot of stuff based on old archive.org snapshots. The eventual end goal is gonna be to have as much historical CU web content up and viewable as possible. I'd like to even extend that further to some other past projects, such as United AlyCraft and other... more obscure projects. However, all of that is stuff that's gonna take time - but today marks the first step in that process. Most old URLs that reference stuff from the old main website have been redirected to the archived site, with most remaining links to be configured in the coming days. For the most part, things should be pretty seamless. Whew - that ended up being a lot longer than I was expecting, but hey - it's been a while, anyways. Regardless - if you find any issues with the website - like any missing images, any broken links, etc - please be sure to report it on the bug tracker! Otherwise, be sure to keep your eyes peeled - like always, there's stuff coming down the pipeline that we can't wait to share.
  2. Hey, everyone! After hearing me talk about it for months at this point - and after over a year since the BungeeCord migration was considered "complete", cross-server warps and teleportation is now in the server. Using the new Warps System The new warps system consolidates the old CUWarps and Essentials warps systems into one, unified system. You may previously recall that you had both the /pwarp and /warp commands. Now, everything is under /warp - no need for /pwarp anymore. Warp management has been redone and can be managed using /mywarps. This will allow you to purchase warps, warp aliases, and manage your existing ones. What are warp aliases, you might ask? Warp aliases are a new addition to allow for easier management of, well, aliases. For those times where you might want multiple warps pointing to the same spot, you can now purchase aliases for warps - and manage all of them as a single warp. At this time, aliases do not show in /warp list - though this may be changed at a later date. You might also notice some blue warps in the /warp list. These are "Official" warps. Any warps that go to server-specific locations (such as spawns, /warp help, and other such locations) are classified as official warps. Other than being displayed differently in the warp list, there's nothing different about these. Restricted Servers Something you may notice when trying to manage warps or teleport, you'll find in some cases that you are unable to. The new plugin has a configurable list of servers where the players within cannot be teleported to. This currently includes Minigames, Vanilla, and Factions. You also won't be able to manage warps here, either. You are able to teleport out of these servers, but not back in - after all, it'd be pretty rough if you were able to teleport to someone's faction or vanilla base, or to a minigame arena in progress, right? That's cool and all... but why the wait? Ah yes. The question I'm sure many of you are wondering - why exactly did this seemingly simple feature take over a year to make a reality? Well, there's a few different reasons - let's go through them all individually. Bungee-Bukkit Communication For starters, it's important to recognize that BungeeCord and Bukkit (in other words, any of the individual gamemodes - like survival, skyblock, creative, etc) have virtually no way to talk to each other. BungeeCord only knows what server a player is connected to, and can connect them to another server if needed. BungeeCord has no knowledge of what world a player is in, nor their coordinates or anything like that. Additionally, the only default method of communicating between the two involves using the player as a vehicle to carry that data. In other words, if no player is on to switch between those servers, data cannot be transmitted. So, the plugin we made requires that we build our own communication method - which thankfully, isn't as hard as it sounds. We used something called Redis - which both BungeeCord and Bukkit can listen to and monitor - and it allows for the two to communicate almost instantly. And as a result of this... Code Complexity and Motivation ... the code for what would normally be a simple Bukkit plugin became three separate Eclipse projects: CUBungee - The BungeeCord plugin that we've been using for a number of general-purpose features, and would house most of the warp and teleport functionality. CUBungeeBukkitBridge - A plugin which sits on each Bukkit server (each gamemode) and responds to messages from BungeeCord. CUBungeeCommon - A library shared by both CUBungee and CUBungeeBukkitBridge, containing a number of common classes used by both projects. Additionally, it took a very long time to find a system of communication that was maintainable. The root issue with most of the previous approaches was that the old setup required bouncing around to different parts of code. All of the business of /setwarp wasn't in a class or file named Setwarp, like you'd expect - but instead, everything after the first message sent from BungeeCord was done in a completely different part of code. For comparison - setting a warp in Bukkit involves the following steps: Get the current location of the player Construct a new warp with player's current location (and provided inputs for name and such) Register new warp That's it. Now - with BungeeCord - what does that look like? Find out what server the player is in Ask that server where the player's location is Wait for the reply Check the reply to see if the response was valid If valid, construct a new warp with the player's location (and once again, provided inputs for name and privacy) Register new warp And for fun - what about teleporting to a warp in BungeeCord? Get the warp the player wants to teleport to Find out what server the warp points to Ask that server if the world the warp has exists Wait for reply Check reply to see if world exists If so, instruct server to teleport the player to the warp's location upon login Connect the player to the warp's server Whew - that's quite the process. What about in Bukkit, though? Get the warp the player wants to teleport to Check if the world exists If so, teleport player to warp location As you can likely tell - the BungeeCord procedures for all of this are significantly more complex than if it was all done within a single Bukkit server. This complexity is unavoidable - however as described before, I was writing the code in a way that made this entire procedure a lot more painful than it had to be. Eventually, I came up with the idea of transforming the original message into the reply - allowing me to simply wait for the reply within the same part of code. As such, everything needed for the /setwarp command could all be done within the same file. This simple re-contextualization is all that was needed to make the codebase more maintanable. I also have to credit @GuitarXpress here as well - as he helped point out one critical issue which was causing me a major headache where I was observing what I could only describe as quantum mechanics in Minecraft. I had a point where the reply messages would ALWAYS time out waiting for a reply. Which was bad - because if I couldn't get a reply, then the entire idea was going to be scrapped. However, as soon as I started printing this one value to console, it ALWAYS replied in time. Remove the log event? Stops working. The act of trying to monitor a certain variable was changing the result - literal quantum mechanics. But no - turns out, I simply needed to add the volatile keyword to that variable - as the problem was that the part of code checking it was just not seeing the new value. That final breakthrough was the big thing that allowed everything to finally fall into place. Now - you might be wondering, when did this great breakthrough happen? Just under 2 weeks ago - July 5th to be exact. Yep - after solving the code complexity issues, cross-server teleportation and cross-server warps were able to be completed within a couple weeks. But... Can't you just use a plugin that someone else already made? This is another question I got a few times. Why is it that in a world where tons of plugins are readily available, that seemingly nobody has bothered to make a plugin for cross-server warps and teleports in a BungeeCord network? Well, for starters - the way we use warps are actually a bit different than most warps, since we allow players to directly purchase warps with ingame currency. Most warp plugins don't allow for this. We actually did find a cross-server warp plugin, but it didn't allow for private or unlisted warps, nor did it allow for user-purchasable warps. But the bigger reason why this kind of feature is seemingly so rare is that, in almost every scenario, servers with BungeeCord networks are much larger in scale and scope (and player count). They actually isolate their gamemodes on purpose. They don't want chat or teleports or warps to be interleaved together across everything - because if you have hundreds or thousands of players, this can actually be a huge detriment. However, we moved to BungeeCord purely out of technical reasons - having all of our features and gamemodes within a single Bukkit server resulted in poor performance, lots of lag, and made debugging an absolute nightmare. Rather than having 8 servers with a handful of plugins each, we had one server with over 120 plugins. Of course, I didn't want to start cutting gamemodes - as while we're small, every gamemode gets some attention. And rather than removing choices for people and potentially causing them to leave, we opted to migrate to BungeeCord. But all the while, I still wanted everything to feel connected - to maintain the illusion of everything still being within a single server. This is the complete antithesis of what most BungeeCord servers aim to achieve - and so there simply isn't demand for something like this. That's why I had to build it myself - because nobody else needed to. Wrapping Up But thankfully - it's finally in. There are still a couple minor fixes I need to do here and there, but overall - it's all ready to go. As per usual with any new feature, let me know if you run into any issues. This plugin is hot off the presses, so it's entirely likely that there's a bug that we didn't catch during testing. Other than that - be on the lookout for additional improvements coming sooner rather than later. The need to get this feature done has been a dark cloud hanging over my motivation to work on server plugins - so finally having it behind me I suspect will have positive effects on my drive to work on the more exciting stuff.
  3. Howdy, folks! You may have noticed that the forums were offline for a bit today. That's because today was the day of... The Big Move™. And by that, I mean that today was the day we migrated away from InMotion Hosting. But why? Why the sudden webhost migration? Well, if you've been active on the Discord - you'll know this wasn't sudden at all. This has been the plan since earlier this year. It just took until fairly recently for it to become feasible - or at least, seemingly feasible. Why We Moved As great as InMotion has been considering how much we paid for it, they've become increasingly frustrating to work with. On more than one occasion, I would get an email in my inbox telling me to remove a handful of .zip files. You see, according to their ToS, you aren't allowed to use the webhost for anything other than a website and email. Hosting files or other content that isn't explicitly part of a website doesn't fall into that category. I was at first unaware of this - because let's be real, nobody reads the ToS. Luckily, they don't just instantly shut your account off if they detect zip files. You get 48 hours to remove the files and only if you fail to do so afterwards are you at any risk of account termination. At first, this was still a pretty fair thing. It wasn't every single zip file, rather it was just a handful of larger ones - usually world archives. By the time this started to come up, I'd already had a subscription to OpenDrive, which gives me unlimited cloud storage for a mere $100 a year. So - I just moved everything over there, and while it took a while (especially to upload), it was done and things were good. But of course, if that's where it ended, we wouldn't be putting up a topic saying we'd moved away from them, would we? No - this continued to become more and more of a problem. What started as requests to remove 20-50GB archives later turned into 100-300MB archives, and later did in fact turn into every single .zip archive on the entire host. The last email I got about excessive "backup content" was one listing 196 different files, many of which were only a few megabytes in size. A select few were larger - but some of them were so small that they were even less than 1MB. This wasn't the only issue I'd had with them. Additionally, performance had become a recurring problem. Now in fairness - this is undoubtedly in part due to poor optimizations on my part. There's likely stuff I could do to improve things. For a while, the banner images you'd see on most pages were at 4k resolution, and in PNG format. Many of those were later downscaled to 1080p JPEGs, which somewhat helped. However, one of the biggest factors with the performance of the host happened to not be large images used in various places - but rather, resource limitations on the host itself. Not disk or storage limits, mind you - one of the best things about InMotion was the unlimited everything. Turns out, the CPU usage even during a single page load was being maxed out. The poor response times were a result of the machine itself being stressed and strained. Now, you might be wondering - why not just make a ticket? I could've theoretically made a ticket with them, because it's entirely possible the CPU usage had little to do with my own site. And this comes into the other issues with InMotion - it was a shared host. For smaller or simpler websites, there's absolutely nothing wrong with shared hosting. All the hard management stuff is taken care for you out of sight - all you worry about is the content itself and that's it. Things just work - and that's the beauty of it. It worked for us for a while too, and it perhaps could've continued to do so going forward. However, when running under shared hosting, if someone else is hitting the CPU hard for whatever reason, that'll start to affect you, too. It's all under the same machine - hence the term, "shared" hosting. You can get dedicated hosting to work around this, but this tends to be much more costly. The common thread interleaved between these issues all center around one thing - ownership and control. And that's precisely what this move was designed to fix. Our New Home So, where did we move? What hosting company did we go with? If you're active on Discord you already know the answer, but if not... nobody. We aren't hosted with any 3rd party company. For the first time in CU's history since 2015, one of our services is running off of owned hardware. That's to say, hardware that is itself entirely under ownership and control of CU. I've upgraded my home internet to a business plan with faster speeds (at virtually no increased cost), rebuilt my old AMD FX-8370 desktop, hooked it up to my TV, and went out and bought a single-user cPanel/WHM license and got everything set up. The only stipulation with that single-user license is that it runs in a virtual environment - which it does. However, I am in full control of this virtual environment and it's got plenty of breathing room to work with - so any performance/latency losses from virtualization should be negligible. The system is setup to have automated backups, and I'll be getting it setup to periodically upload them to OpenDrive as well for added peace of mind, as the website is one of those things that we've been negligent to back up regularly. Along with that, it's got two 2TB hard drives that are mirrored - so it's also safe from any potential hard drive failures as well. Now - full disclosure, this is partially an experiment in a way. It took a lot of tinkering and many days of slamming my face into my desk to work out some of the kinks with the whole setup - but things should be running smoothly now. Even so, I fully expect bugs to crop up just because of the fairly different system being run. Along with that, I'm also in the middle of sorting out stability issues with the FX board itself. But don't panic - I've got a backup board/CPU if it turns out that the FX (or the board it's on) are faulty. The issue at this time appears to be a faulty RAM stick - which has since been removed and the server has been stable ever since, but we won't know for sure for another week or so. If the site does happen to go offline, I can assure you it'll come right back online as soon as possible. And, in the worst case scenario - if running this stuff off of local hardware turns out to be completely infeasible and just isn't working out, I'll be holding onto the InMotion host for a while still - so that if we ever have to move back over, we can. But, as of now - everything seems solid. DNS works, Email works, the forums and website both work, everything seems to finally just work. If you find something that goes against that - don't hesitate to report it on the bug tracker. If the site happens to go offline for an extended period of time, ping me or DM me on Discord and I'll get it back online once I see it (likely after doing some hardware maintenance if it turns out the machine froze again). Oh, and be sure to let us know if the site is any faster than before. It should be a little faster, but there's still one more hardware upgrade that the machine needs - so it won't be running at full speed until then. Otherwise, if no issues arise - that's it. We're moved onto what will hopefully be the new home of the Chaotic United, Elaztek, and any other websites for the foreseeable future. And this time, there's nobody to tell us what content we can or can't have on the site. No arbitrary rules on zip files or having too large of files. The only one who has any say in what we do with the CU website, is us. And damn does that feel good. Just as a sidenote, I'm not intending to throw any shade at InMotion. They gave us pretty decent hosting for 13 bucks a month. Unlimited disk space, addon domains, email accounts, and so on. The performance wasn't great - but even then, when it's that cheap, it's hard to argue with it too much. If you happen to be wanting to host a site of your own, don't let my words against shared hosting scare you off of it. For simpler stuff or for people just getting started, shared hosting is affordable and relatively easy to use. It served ourselves, Nuclear District, and the old CU well for many years - we've just decided we want to take things into our own hands now. Anywho, that's all we've got for this one folks! Apologies for the downtime - though to be honest, it didn't last nearly as long as I was expecting. Overall, the migration went about as smooth as I could've asked for. Be sure to let us know if you run into any issues on the site.