Deliberative December

Well it's about time for another wall of text to clutter the portal a news post regarding various changes to the services StormBit offers:

First and foremost, "TempCraft" has been reborn under the name "The Depths".
The namechange brings with it a swathe of improvements, as much of the server's infrastructure has been rebuilt from scratch:
The controversial client which was forced upon all users is long gone, and now new players are able to login via the official client (or one of it's many mods, such as SpoutCraft which we explicitly support). Players with existing accounts will need to enable the vanilla client in their User Control Panel on the website.
Everything about the new server has been designed to improve player experience, right down from the new spawn to the new website.
BukkitIRCd has been developed in-house to further improve the experience for users, and integrates with our IRC network to provide seamless chat between those in game, and those out of game.
The worlds are all blank, so now is the perfect opportunity to claim land and to build things. Have fun, but remember to follow the rules in doing so.

Secondly, something which I am personally more involved with, our IRC network has been growing.
Initially, we switched all of our servers over to InspIRCd2 due to the appalling support that the UnrealIRCd team were offering. In the latest major release the changelog added nothing noteworthy, and yet it is still not suitable for a multi-server network. With InspIRCd we have a plethora of new features and abilities as well as better recovery in the event of something going wrong.
Shortly after the change, we ended up linking with ReimuNET. The newfound connections later led to Physibots and XFCab linking with us.
On the janus side of things, we have secured links with TsukiIRC and Lost Signal.
As such, our current (connectable) IRC server tree list as follows:

• ridley.stormbit.net
• odin.stormbit.net
• irc.reimuhakurei.net
• aperture.stormbit.net
• irc.xfcab.com

We're looking at linking with additional networks via either janus or a merger, and as such have made the linking requirements publically available.

Finally, in news about this site in general, we're working on two things:

• (Yet another) Site upgrade, this time a 'final', but that will meet our needs for both a forum and content management better.
• Another site, which will for now remain a 'secret' project. There is no major reason as to why it is hidden other than that in it's current state it's rather unusable and insecure. Both things that are being worked on (obviously).

Anyway, I'm off to go waste more time and resources. Happy holidays everyone!

- Antoligy

P.S. There are also another two minecraft servers now up. I'm not telling where though :3

I actually also was going to put staff changes in there too, I guess I forgot...
ah well, I'll put up a seperate post then.

Delicious news post. we need to plan some kind of holiday event, too

Mahogany is pretty good too, in my humble opinion.

African Mahogany is best Mahogany. [spoiler]that's about the only good thing that comes from Africa, anyway[/spoiler]