Descentforum.NET

[Do_Checkor]

As it appears barely anyone outside of Germany knows about what Descentforum.NET is and how it works I'd like to introduce the project here today. Especially as the number of members and donations has decreased a lot I've been paying hundreds of Euros on my own this year. I had to consider if this is really worth it if there are barely any people at all who are interested enough to support the project. Well - I've never asked about support here as the German community was always large and active enough to collect the annual fee on their own in the past. After ~11 years of D3 I noticed a downward tendency.

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Descentforum.NET is a project which is running since January 2003 about a server-rental in Germany to host Descent-related services such as Game-Servers, Chat-, Application-, File and Web-Server incl. the Descentforum.de forum and several other descent-related pages and things such as a Teamspeak- and Ventrillo- Server, an IRC-Server, a Server-On-Demand (SOD) System and the member-sites as well as much further Descent-stuff like moon's Descendarium, holbred's Descent, the Pyromania project, the backup for DFiles.de and many many more things...

People of the Descent community participate by donations (or call it membership-fees if you want, which would be 5 Euros / ~7 US $ per month) as the rent costs about 120 US$ every month. Members (usually users of Descentforum.DE) gain some special privileges and access to special features as you can read below.

Descentforum.NET is coordinated and administered by Do_Checkor. Floyd and Zorc are the co-admins at the moment.

The hosting is done in the computer center of \"Schlund und Partner\" in Karlsruhe, Germany (1and1 nowadays).
Currently it is a Dual 2.0 GHz AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ CPU server in a 19\" rack with 1024 MB RAM on Windows 2003 Server 64bit running as OS. The costs are about 89.00 € per month (ATM about 120 US$ ).


Advantages of the membership to Descentforum.NET (contract free / no obligations / no contract period)


1.: You can get an email-addy @descentforum.de or @descentforum.net
as an pop3/imap- / webmail-account or a mail-forwarding to an existing addy.
You can have a spam-protection or auto-responder for these accounts if preferred.

2.: You can get FTP access to your own web space (for descent-related
contents only) like www.descentforum.net/membername/ with 100 MB
space after payed membership of at least 6 months.

3.: Possibility to have your preferred level hosted. A minimum of THREE days is
guaranteed for the mission to run every month of active membership.

4.: For banning purposes and setting questions a voting right is granted to you.

5.: Only members have the right to get Private-Game-Servers (for 1on1s etc.)

6.: Access to the member-only areas inside www.descentforum.de and
the team-speak-server-channels (TS.Descentforum.NET:1236, pass: DFNET).

7.: Access to the SOD - Server-On-Demand system to launch spontaneous games
via website-configuration (easy-to-use), and the right to vote level additions.

If you want to join and get the banking details please send a mail to Checkor [AT] Descentforum [DOT] NET - or send me a private message here. Membership costs 5,00 Euros (~7,00 US$) per month and can be paid via PayPal too (click the link at the bottom of each descentforum.de page here or on www.descentforum.net ). A minimum of 5 Euros and a maximum payment of 60 Euros is set as a \"payment term\".

Any questions? Language issues? PM me!

Thank you for reading!

Martin \"Do_Checkor\" Timmermann

[Do_Checkor]

Descentforum.NET is now being migrated to a new server (twice the RAM and more CPU power) and a new operating system.

A nice deal with the hosting provider ensured cost reduction also.

Short outages of all services in the near future shall be forgiven.

The current status of the move can be seen here:

http://www.descentforum.net/DFNET3WorkFlow.html

Paypal links have been updated / redistributed and are still open as well as happy for donations

[Burlyman]

what about the game servers :P

[Do_Checkor]

What?

[Burlyman]

did you upgrade the game servers xD

[Alter-Fox]

If these servers are in Germany that explains my pings...

[Do_Checkor]

did you upgrade the game servers xD

Well the actual server move has not been done yet but the game servers will be included within this process, too.

And yes, Descentforum.NET has always been in Germany - connected with 100MBit to one of the best internet backbones in Europe (Karlsruhe)...

[Alter-Fox]

Well I never get an average ping below 90 on any server anyway (sometimes it goes down to 50 on Valhalla, but only if I'm not doing anything)... I'm too far north for most of them (and the only Canadian servers are too far east). I don't particularly mind pings of over 200 or 300, I don't play to win anyway (something to do with the idea that I'll just be disappointed). If I feel like playing and there's a game up I'll play it regardless of where it is.

You may want to remove the rapid fire powerups from your skybox game though. They cause a lot of kicks because the server thinks the players are cheating (I guess sometimes the server doesn't get the memo that the powerup turned off). Every time I play it there is at least one kick, and the only reason there aren't more is that people avoid the powerup like the plague (so it doesn't add anything to the game anyway, except an obstacle). IMO rapid fire is only useful in single player anyway (it's just as easy to dodge a laser regardless of how fast it fires... it still moves at the same speed).

[Do_Checkor]

You may want to remove the rapid fire powerups from your skybox game though.

Fair enough - it's now gone - nobody ever told me before, though...

Thanks!

[Behemoth]

Would you mind switching the BOZ level to something more like Kata2 or Athena, Vamped, Skybox or Indika 5?
I say Indika 5 because 3 is too small for them, and it's easy to rack up alot of kills.

[Glowhyena]

What?

Ignore him.

[Do_Checkor]

Sure, Behe!

Mind keeping BOZ stuff within the other topic, please? http://descentbb.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15534

@ Glow: K. Done. Thx.