Welcome to the Axis & Allies .org Forums! Please feel free to use this topic to introduce yourself to the community. Or if you’re a long time member, feel free to re-introduce yourself.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, for instance:

• Where are you from?
• What Axis & Allies games do you like to play?
• How often do you play?
• Do you use any customizations (tables, painted pieces) or house rules?

Finally, when you read something posted here, please give it a heart/upvote :heart: and please be sure to look at the past introductions and give those hearts too! In general, be generous giving out those hearts, that goes for you lurkers as well; even if you don’t post it lets everybody know that you’re still here. :sunglasses:

Whether you’re a lurker or active poster, it’s great to read past introductions to see where people are from and to meet this community.

Every so often we will move the posts in this topic to a monthly topic, please see past intros below.

• February 2019
• January 2019
• December 2018
• November 2018

Welcome to the Axis & Allies .org Forums! Please feel free to use this topic to introduce yourself to the community. Or if you’re a long time member, feel free to re-introduce yourself.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, for instance:

• Where are you from?
• What Axis & Allies games do you like to play?
• How often do you play?
• Do you use any customizations (tables, painted pieces) or house rules?

Finally, when you read something posted here, please give it a heart/upvote!

I’m Dave Jensen and I created this site in January 2000 and added forums about a year later. The origins of the site actually started as early as 1996 when I created a page on the web server of the college I was attending, Pomona College. The site was called David Jensen’s Axis & Allies archive and had a few articles and house rules.

I payed my first game of Axis & Allies 2nd Edition Classic in middle school when my good friend @rmorel introduced me and another friend, Ross, to the game. In high school the three of us go together nearly every Friday to play A&A or D&D (I was a terrible Dungeon Master).

Now, I live in San Francisco with my wife and two cats. I’m a software developer and entrepreneur, I run a tech startup that provides software for breweries, called Brewd.

My favorite version of Axis & Allies is Anniversary Edition but I mostly play 1942 Second Edition. I’ve been in the finals for 42SE at Gen Con but was narrowly defeated after getting the worst rolls of my life on USSR turn 1! I also enjoy a fun, casual game of A&A Zombies here and there.

January 2020 marks the 20th year that this website has been in operation. I would like to say thank you to everybody who has made this possible.

We’re using Cloudflare (CF) now to help with the bots and caching the site. After installation, CF was quite aggressive against anything automated including TripleA clients. I set up a rule to allow TripleA traffic.

So it’s all fixed now and the site should feel faster.

Since migrating the forums, I’ve spent some time away from work, gave up free time, and sacrificed sleep to get everything just right. While I was visiting family the day before Thanksgiving, I actually had to stop in the middle of a conversation to fix a server that was crashing.

Yet, there is still more work to do.

There are changes coming to the software that I’ve directly suggested to the NodeBB team, there are changes I’ll be contributing myself, and there are still numerous items on the to-do list, including improvements to the theme. This is not something that was even possible with the old forums.

If I were consulting on a project like this I would charge upwards of $175/hour for all of the customizations, bug fixing, and code changes I’ve made. Even though I try to run this site as a business, the “pay” is peanuts. I do this because it can be fun but when it stops being fun, why should I bother having this site at all? And if patron support stays at it’s current level, shutting down will have to be a consideration.

Suggestions are welcome and I will take the appropriate action based on the type of feedback. Direct and higher quality feedback is easier to act on. Subjectice negativity, is not only impossible to act on, it’s also frustrating. I want everyone to like the site but I also cannot please everyone. If you don’t like something, please try to understand why you don’t like it and then provide feedback in detail. You also need to understand that your feedback may be easy, difficult, or impossible to address or I might disagree.

Also, when I first started this site, it was a bit of a technical playground for me. In the early 2000s, it wasn’t easy to host a site and the challenge was fun. I even built a static site generator in 2000 before it was a thing (I used XML and XSLT). It was even more difficult to get a database going to set up a forum. The act of doing this project and seeing that a community coalesced around it was awesome.

With GenAI and code “co-pilots” I’m getting back to those roots of experimentation and technical exploration to create something for the A&A community. I’ve literally wanted to build a real odds calculator for A&A since 1996. Now, it shouldn’t be too difficult. I created this linktree-style site in a few minutes, instead of hours: https://axisandallies.link

And weeks of work to create a new site and migrate off of Wordpress will turns a weeks-long project into days.

Now when I do a little work here and a little work there, real progress is made.

Anyway, keep an eye out for some fun stuff this year.

I would like to organize an Axis & Allies (World) Cup.

Here’s what I have so far regarding how it works:

• Teams of 4-6 players (preferably geolocated but not necessary)
• Each “Round” of the Cup features a different Axis & Allies game
• A team would field 2 squads of 2-3 per round to play other teams’ squads
• Game play would be mostly online
• Playing in person would be encouraged. For each game played in person (win or lose) a team would get points towards “home field advantage.”
• The cup would take 10-12 months to complete, I think.

I’m still working out home field advantage but I think there might need to be a playoff or championship game after the final round to determine the champion.

• Home field advantage allows the choice for the game for a playoff or championship
• Given the point is crowning the best all around A&A players; it’s not that much of an advantage but it makes it a bit more fun.

I’m working on a print & play preview of Axis & Allies North Africa. I’ll keep you posted. Since I’ll need to run it by Renegade, mid-to-late next week before I publish.

Just in the nick of time, the SSL certificate is installed and renewed for another 2 years and 3 months. Happy secure browsing!

Maybe one of these days I’ll figure out how to get Let’s Encrypt free certs going.

@KnowMad IIRC the next major Anniversary is next year in 2024 so maybe it will be released then.

IMO, 1942SE should be deprecated in favor of 1942 Third Edition which should be Anniversary Ed with some of the updated rules for AAA guns, etc. But that’s just my opinion; only Renegade knows what is in store for A&A.

We’re using Cloudflare (CF) now to help with the bots and caching the site. After installation, CF was quite aggressive against anything automated including TripleA clients. I set up a rule to allow TripleA traffic.

So it’s all fixed now and the site should feel faster.

If it doesn’t work on this topic, try a new one. Sometimes these things get cached somewhere.

@surfer And does downloading work?

Also, please try TripleA again. It might work.

@surfer I think I’m having problems following the issue. Can you describe the problem or problems that you’re experiencing?

@farmboy said in BM Surfer (L+15) vs Farmboy (X):

I’m getting an error code 403 when I try to post

When you post from the browser or from TripleA?

@captainwalker Okay, that’s weird. Let me look today.

@captainwalker Yeah, last night I was working the problem and causing a few disruptions while doing it. Everything should be stable now and far fewer bots taking up resources.

Okay, this time for real. We’re running through Cloudflare now. Sticky sessions enabled so that your websocket sessions don’t switch servers and get all confused.

I was seeing the yellow box in the lower right corner warning that “it looks like you’re not connected” or something like that.

I restarted a few things and it went away for me. I’m hoping that you all are also not seeing that error but if you are. Please let me know.

Also; the site really does seem faster, right?

It kinda feels like the site is faster today right?

I enabled Cloudflare so I think it’s working. Sorry Chinese AI bots, you don’t get to have A&A in your language models.

However, I think there are some issues with over-aggressive caching. Working on it.