Traffic spike

@barnee I doubt that it is something on your end. I am regularly experiencing this, getting “temporarily unavailable due to heavy load” messages almost every day.
It’s not only bound to the login but to the access to the forum in general.

@SuperbattleshipYamato well it was alot different back when we allowed Politics to flourish. Mary and Jennifer used to get into great battles, then we had Sexual Harassment Panda, Mr. Smith, et al who posted like 30 times a day. I recall about 3 others who were nasty but eventually drifted off under a rock.

@djensen

yes i’ve noticed time of day as well. Is fine currently. 7 pm Central US

Thanks for calling that out, I missed it. Most of the changes I mentioned are for www side of the site, which helps funnel new people into the forums.

Thanks for the suggestions!

@CentralCommando said in Celebrating 25 Years:

@djensen All of them seem interesting, as long as you get AI summaries to work properly, Apple sort of made that feature look bad. Here are some ideas to consider:

I’ll be using something more like ChatGPT.

Dynamic Forum Icons: Many Icons on the forums are just speech bubbles, which takes away some of the identity of the games. Instead, you could have each icon sort of represent the games. (North Africa could have a silhouette of Libya and Egypt, Anniversary could have a 25th or 40th, etc.)

I can work on that. I’m not a graphic designer so it’s a little more difficult for me to get it just right. GenAI is okay at monochromatic vector art but not quite there yet.

“Pinned” Categories: What I mean by this is that users can right-click categories and “pin” them to the top of the forum page. The reason why the pinning is air quoted is because it would only show up on that users end (If I “pinned” a category, only I could see it).

That sounds like a functionality request for NodeBB. It would be fairly core so I’m not sure I can write a plugin to do this.

Themes: While it could just be light and dark mode, I think it would be cool to have ones based off of Axis and Allies games. For example, 1984 Classic would have almost like that 80s paint style, 1914 could have the gradient of the map over a tan background and have trenches and gas masks at the bottom. This is just another thing that would add flavor.

Themes can be difficult to maintain. I’m actually considering moving to the new default “look and feel” of NodeBB soon. I’ll have to re-theme that with the colors I would prefer so I’ll take a look at making multiple themes.

I hope you consider these additions!

So, I think I’m going to push this out another several months. To celebrate 25, I think I just want to get back into the swing of things. Maybe do a giveaway. Go to a bunch of events. And play lot’s of A&A. Be more active here.

It may be an open secret but I just don’t play a ton of A&A these days.

However, I really, really enjoyed playtesting Stalingrad last Fall. I played som D-Day with @The_Good_Captain recently. Two games in a row; first one he shut me out. Second one was closer but he won hands down. Despite the loss, it was awesome. The next day @rmorel and I played Anniversary edition with Dale (not sue if he’s here), my dice were on fire but even if they were not; it was a great time.

I’m going to do more of that. Work on the website. Run an event at GenCon, etc.

@Midnight_Reaper

you should donate more.

On the bright side, this means that Google is looking to put on their map…

-Midnight_Reaper