Black Raven Dragoons

[Zancarius]

It's hard to believe we've been officially around for 10 years, at least starting from our inception in World of Warcraft on January 21st, 2005. Although it wasn't until about a year later when we began absorbing members from other defunct guilds when Josh finally broke down and registered the guild site.

We've had a pretty impressive run. We've played a ton of games. We even did a few odds and ends no one really expected of us, and we showed a few raiding guilds what-for. It's been great, and here's looking to another 10 years with the whole lot of you 'goons (although some of us, myself included, have been way too scarce due to a variety of things).

So, here's what I have in store.

First, I'm finally planning on finishing the replacement layout for the forums. This will be applied either next week or the week after, because we have to perform a few upgrades in the interim, and I need to coordinate that with Josh. The phpBB-related upgrades will likely be performed by me, particularly since I know its internals, and because I've been testing some upgrade processes locally on my machine. Due to the nature of the upgrade, we will have to remove several previous themes that were available, a few plugins here and there, and begin the migration with care. phpBB 3.1 now makes use of the Symfony framework bringing with it numerous improvements and laying the groundwork for (finally) eliminating a lot of the cruft that's built up over the years.

Second, we'll discuss moving away from Apache and migrating the web services toward nginx + PHP-FPM. nginx has generally better performance than Apache, and the configuration is much simpler. I've moved many of my own sites away from Apache mostly because of the simplified configuration (performance is nice, but repeatable configurations are better). More importantly, nginx makes it much easier to proxy websockets and other connections to a backend service. This means we'll possibly be added a real time web-based chat to the goon site at some point in the future.

Finally, we will be implementing a few other little goodies here and there. Mostly I'm thinking of a better screenshot sharing mechanism, but that's something that is planned for the future. For the time being, some of the nifty odds and ends will have to be handled manually, but I intend to release a way of uploading screenshots and selecting what parts of them you want to turn into a banner.

Cheers, guys. Hope to see you all around!

[MaxRile]

I look forward to Star Citizen and playing it with you all. Im going to get in to some Elite Dangerous to bide my time till it comes out so if your all wanting to try it out. Ill be picking it up soon =)