Current State of AWBW and AW (June 2014)

First topic message reminder :

AWBW has been down and up and now permanently down (? who knows?) for 3 weeks or more and its looking Grim.
The previous admin and marriner appear to be just busy with other projects .  I emailed marriner last week and offered to help in any way  (to cover server costs or whatever or even to take over site management but havent heard back as yet.  
Jake Ruiz similarly offered to help (mentioned in this fórum), presumably no luck there either so far.

The worst thing really is that we have no idea what is going on . So I think we must suppose that nothing much is likely to happen with AWBW coming  back.

Please anyone with any news about AWBW please post here.
Also anyone who knows how to contact marriner please do so and with the backing of myself and many more less vocal but equally keen enthusiasts of AW and the AWBW implementation. I didnt yet try twitter to contact marriner !?


Note:The global league had some 80 active players with multiple games (and another 40 or so inactive accounts) plus AWBW had 30 or players in the special leagues plus a number of other random games and many multiplayer maps.
So AWBW was definitely still flying though not as high as years back.

I encourage all AWBW fans to join with all AW fans and we must now think more widely about AW and the very similar games such as panzer general and others going back before gameboy even.  
For example I found a website not used much in 3 years called Space Cows which without the cows is basically AW but without certain features like CO powers, fog. Also the units are somewhat difficult to differentiate.  This and other similar AW stuff is properly announced elsewhere in this sub Fórum  "AW News".

We probably now need to distinguish between marriners AWBW and more general "Online AW" which of course are quite different from "AW" --which a lot of people will interpret as the GBA games against the AI -- the latter is really a bit dull for experienced online players who only like to play against humans because it is more fun and of course the GB AI just cant handle high complexity of decent size AW maps. (making AW superior to chess as strategy game)

So until further AWBW news, I adjourn effort to other threads under AW or online AW.

Good work Iordor

NP, I spent way too much time on this game to just watch it die away!

Updates:

Ok great work, so we've narrowed down one of the main issues as server costs

Iodor, would you know if aaron have a contactable email we can speak with him re/ this? We should find out more details around how much the total server costs are, how much he wants us to contribute to keep it going.

Then we can go from there

Here it is: amarriner@amarriner.com I don't know how often he checks his email/answers it.

Ok so it seems like that is his main email.

I'll send an email this weekend, and see if he replies, and I will post the contents of my email here. If anyone has anything to add, please speak up

I sent an email this morning to amarriner@amarriner.com, so I don't keep you all in the dark:


Hi Aaron

I'm 'strike1' from https://isndev.forumotion.co.uk/t638p15-current-state-of-awbw-and-aw-june-2014

I know you created the site and have been covering the server costs for a long time out of your own pocket and for that we are all very grateful. It is the best advance wars site out there, it has a loyal following and we would like to keep it going.

I'm thinking the community could organise an annual fund-raiser if you let us know how much it is costing and how much you think we should chip in.

If there are any other issues re/ site management and what the community can do to help, please also let us know. I'm not a programmer myself, but I am sure there are willing volunteers who can help. An issue flagged was the possibility of deleting inactive users and b/c grade maps that are rarely used.

Regards

Clement

Well written message, strike - I'll send it to him in a couple of days on twitter if he doesn't respond by then. He has told me that the 10th anniversary is coming up, and he'd like to keep it running if he could.

What would be cool is he we could do a kickstarter, or something and fund him to redo the entire site with flash capabilities, and such.

Let's set up a fundraiser thread. I'm willing to chip in as well

Message from Aaron:

Hi there,
Thanks for getting in touch with me. I definitely don't mind keeping AWBW up and running and rebooting stuff from time to time. As you noted, the biggest impediment to that is the hosting costs. For a while it was fine, but my financial situation has changed a bit and it's a little tougher to handle. Some kind of fundraiser just for the hosting costs would be fantastic. I'm not looking to make any money there so I'd want to be careful we just get what we need. Even if it doesn't reach the entire cost of hosting for a year I don't mind footing some of the cost.

Last October I paid $450 for the year, so it'll be coming up again in a few months. I'm going to contact the host because it seems as though perhaps their costs may have decreased somewhat? I want to see what my costs will be in October and then I guess we can see where we're at and go from there? I also don't really know the best way to do a fundraiser of this kind so I'll have to research that a bit. I want to be as transparent as possible as to how much money I would need, how much we've collected so far and where it's going.

Thanks,
Aaron

Just now I was surprised to find the AWBW forum back online  
In case it's going down again I'll save a few pages.

Thanks to Amarriner for being awesome and continuing working on AWBW even though it actually costs him money

That's cool - I just went through and saved everything that could be considered important just in case too.

Also looks like we have a new member here guy   :

The forum is indeed back   

I find myself unable to log in, though.

theether wrote:Just now I was surprised to find the AWBW forum back online  
In case it's going down again I'll save a few pages.

Thanks to Amarriner for being awesome and continuing working on AWBW even though it actually costs him money

Accidentally down-voted this sorry. Yeah I was messing with the forums trying to get them back up, but they're super screwed at the moment. Not sure I'll be able to do much more anytime soon. I'll try, though.

Hey Amarriner, it's great to see you in this forum
As long as the game still works, I can live without being able to login to the 'old' forum.
I mean, we have this fine forum here to discuss AWBW for the time being.

But maybe you could link to this forum on AWBW?
That way more people would find their way here and you wouldn't have as much stress with the site

If I see Glen again soon, I'll ask him to put up a link to this forum instead of the old one.

Registered here just to say that it looked like the old forums are back up and I see I've been pre-empted!

Alas.

also hi

How do y'all manage to login, though?
I only get the message "The file you were looking for wasn't found." when trying

And hi

I don't know...I was just logged on automatically. I'd log out to log back in but I worry that that wouldn't work.

It looks like the User Control Panel and PM pages are completely borked.

Also Walker made a post before I did, so it looks like I'm not the only one who can still log in there.

Maybe both of you still have a Cookie from before the forum went down?

My browser deletes them automatically when closed.

I'd believe that. I tend not to delete cookies.

EDIT: btdubs is there a new IRC channel? Or do people no longer go?