MWEB and Telkom are peering locally once again. What does this mean for you?

MWEB players should now be able to play in Telkom games, and vice versa.

This has been confirmed for the Cape Town and Johannesburg exchanges. You may still wish to keep your ISP name in the game title until this has been confirmed nationally.

So, in the turmoil of the recent network problems we have been experiencing, saidin decided to update the underlying software for the ticket system website, which of course broke everything. You may have noticed that the website has been changing, for better or worse, quite a lot over the last 3 days or so. Once things were broken, we decided not to take the shortest path to fixing it, but rather to improve upon things instead. Lemonade from lemons and whatnot. I just thought I would keep you updated on what’s changed.

The first thing you may notice is that upon logging in, the recent activity is in fact, recent activity! Many thanks to Supy for sorting that out. He has also been working on a lost password form, so that you no longer have to email us to get a password reset. We will let you know as soon as it is finished and tested. The only other real change that you will probably notice is attachments now open in a new window, and images actually show in that window! No longer do you have to download images and open them on your pc!

There were many things that broke and had to be fixed along the way, and they seem to have been sorted out, maybe, but those are the only changes you are likely to notice. For the rest, you just need to know that our underlying software is up to date and working happily, and the network issues seem to have sorted themselves out as well.

In other news, DotA v6.72c is out and the WAGE bot has been updated accordingly, hooray!

I updated WAGE this morning (early afternoon). I’m sorry to those people whose games I killed. I meant to let them finish, but stop new games being hosted.

Firstly, the .owner command is no longer available to normal users. People were creating games for their friends, who did not have Web Africa accounts, giving them ownership and then leaving. This is clearly not a use-case the bot was intended for.

The other change was something that was just bugging me for a while. Previously users just ran the command and checked the games list and hoped, which wasn’t great. Users should now receive a whisper from the bot if their game is being hosted.

For the past little while we’ve been having some issues with users signing up with mixed-case passwords. We are pleased to announce that these issues have been resolved.  In-game signups have once again been disabled. Further reading below.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve added new ‘quick’ links to move around our portal and get things done.

Three sub-domains have been added:

• help.twilightgaming.co.za -> This will take you straight to our Knowledge Base for all the help files you’ll ever require
• ticket.twilightgaming.co.za -> This will take you straight to the Open A New Ticket page. Much quicker than having to navigate through the portal
• register.twilightgaming.co.za -> This link will take you straight to the registration page to create a new account

1) changed /games from a failtable to a sentence-like structure:

* Current games of type W3XP
* ————————————
* – [8]…. SD …. by _viXen_ [#7:open:2]
* – [5]apemso by KIMOCHI [#4:open:7]
* – [0]GOGO! by scant [#3:open:3]

In order: Level – game name – game host – game ID – game state – number of players

2) alias /j to /join (similar to /g to /games)

/j W3 Channel

3) Fixed autohelp for softlock (/help softlock)

4) banned ghost bots at a server level and made exceptions for legal bots (more on that soon)

5) added functionality for admins to easily search channel logs (via website) to help monitor various commands which are otherwise obscure to track

6) improved signup process when signing up via forum (will automatically set your pvpgn password)

7) Added new operator commands

- Admin announce between each other
- /kill command
- IPScan command

8 ) Added Pagination to download area

- The download area (http://twilightgaming.co.za/downloads) will now be paged. The latest updates will always be on top, while the older files will be archived in the pages further down.

Restarted server to implement the following updates:

-1 Punishment from all accounts. If your account had 0Pm’s you won’t see a difference.

This is a small present for those with punishments. Last night we held a small trivia-thing where we awarded those without a punishment 250 experience.

Following the punishment deduction we added a delete function for the download section -> admin only.

Visit the download section here.

There used to be lots of 1 000 000 00′s floating (pun!) around. Not anymore they’re not. Fixed.

http://stats.twilightgaming.co.za/ is now hosting PvPGN stats, which is useful for the people who are interested in ladder (both Warcraft and Diablo). Please let us know if there are any issues (other than the experience in D2).

It’s been a while since Twilight has directly linked files on our website. Historically we had a folder we just dumped stuff to and provided links to these files from various forum posts. As to be expected, it wasn’t long before this got abused: so-called “hackers” thought it would be amusing to continuously download these files very slowly, thereby locking up our Web server.

We then swapped to the ISGaming FTP, who have been hosting maps, patches and applications for the past several months on our behalf. This situation no longer works for us, nor do we believe in the uselessness that is FTP.

This afternoon I setup our own little download area, which you can get to at /downloads. This area is custom written (as is the rest of the Portal) and all downloads are protected behind a login – which makes it that much harder to abuse.

Right now, I have uploaded the latest DotA and Mumble versions. During the week we will make the new W3 patch available from this area as well as linking the stable loaders and so forth.

Happy downloading.

The Portal has been largely untouched since it was launched in October. With nearly 750 tickets and over 14 000 votes, we will now be working towards streamlining the experience for operators and users alike.

When the Portal first launched, the new Forums were not open to the public. Since the Forum houses our Knowledge Base, we had to make some temporary hacks to get the Portal to display the articles. Now that the Forum is open to all, that debt has been cleared – links under Knowledge Base in the Portal menu will now take you directly to the Forum article.

The Ticket view has been slowly molested as features were added (such as tagging and categories) – which resulted in a flock of information boxes pushing the real content off-screen. This was largely because we wanted to ensure users knew how to use it. Now that people are more comfortable with the system, we will be condensing information so that it becomes easier to skim-read a Ticket. The first such change sees a removal of two information boxes: the Ticket is now summarised by author, category and tags in a single box.

Root admins are now able to manually override the status of a Ticket. To prevent abuse, all attribute changes are now logged together with the username of the updater. This override is intended to work against irrelevant or manually-solved Tickets, usually caused by users not understanding the correct procedure. If you notice abuse of this, please contact the Inquisition team.

If you have any suggestions for how the Portal and Ticket system can be improved, don’t hesitate to leave them in a comment. As always, the development team can be reached here.