So, I finally went ahead and made a forum for the threads which accompany news posts to be in. I went ahead and moved all the threads which were linked in news posts into it, so people don't have to rely on stickies and so things are easier for me. I may have missed stuff from before we finally got a front page, though. If you notice a thread that should probably be in here, please either post about it here or report the post!

In other news, you should join us in IRC. Yes, you! At the time of writing, we've got 40 people in there, and you would make a great addition! I'll address some potential pitfalls for reasons you may be thinking you won't, in fact, join:

• I don't know how to use IRC!
  • That's okay! We have a super awesome yummy guide written up. Just click "IRC" at the top of the page!
• What's the point of IRC? I can talk to people on Steam and stuff...
  • That's asked a lot, actually. You have to realize that IRC is something where you can talk to anyone that's in there all that you'd like anytime you'd like. If you're like most of us, it means that anytime your PC isn't off, you might as well be signed on! IRC isn't like other mediums, or Steam Chats -- you can idle, chat, read, or whatever you'd like! And, you can leave messages for people (or vice versa) really easily, so people can get back to each other without playing IM tag. Most of all, IRC is where I tend to announce almost all new developments or changes to the server before anywhere else gets it.
• What can I do with TLD's IRC that I can't otherwise do?
  • Let's see... We have a trivia bot (Thanks CyberMonk!), a repository of various hilarious quotes from throughout the channel's history, and plenty of other enjoyable activities to partake in as well. And, starting soon, you'll be able to interact with the server from within IRC! Want to see who's in there, or the next map? Want to say hi to the fair denizens of the server? Chances are, assuming it's not abused, you'll be able to!
• Anything else I should know?
  • Yes, in fact! If you're in IRC, it's really really easy to get hold of an admin for dealing with someone in the server, getting an event sent out, or anything like that. Anyone ops in the channel (signified by a @ before their name) are admins.

So, come, join chat, enjoy! Ciao :)

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Hope you enjoyed the April Fools joke :) Now, I have real news for you! The Lions now have a Battlefield: Bad Company 2 server! Please thank EvilMaverick for his generosity -- he's footing the entire bill each month! He's been offered compensation, but says he wants none but to see your shining, wiggly faces play on said server :) What a sexy nice guy!

>:3 The Lions Den #3: Mortar Madness & C4 Sadness [USA-LA] (Battlefield: Bad Company 2)
Since there's no way to add favorites manually, just filter for ">:3" and it will come up! Then, you can add it forever and ever :)

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We've been doing some thinking here in the admin forum, and we've decided it would be best for the community if we go ahead and change Server #2 over to a 24/7 OrangeX setup with Instant Respawn. Many servers have had great success with this, and as you know, I love OrangeX maps more than any other, with CP Push maps being a close second. I figure we can also run a different mod every day of the week, with mondays being instagib, for example!

These changes will take effect as of tomorrow, April 2nd.

Hope you guys approve, and enjoy!

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Note: this is an excerpt of the actual thread. What follows is the intro, and the info on what the shirts look like.

Okay, so the way this is working is that we have a poll and discussion going in thread, and actual orders are going to Ozmodiar. Voting in the thread means making a financial commitment to purchasing at least one Lion shirt. You can vote without concurrently sending your order to Ozmodiar, but it does still mean that we will be expecting an order of some sort from you. Anyone who votes MUST ALSO REPLY to this thread so that we may at least attempt to keep track of who's participating and for how many shirts each. Please state your vote in the post, preferably using one of the easycopy things below. If, as mentioned above, you're not yet submitting your final order to Ozmodiar, feel free to use the "unsure" version of the easycopy and edit it once you've made up your mind.

We will be ordering the shirts before receiving the money, but they won't be sent to you until moneys are received. It would suck to have extra shirts, unpaid for, with nowhere to go, so there will be repercussions for any who commit to buying to the point of ordering but bail out later on

Okay, so, what will the shirts LOOK LIKE?
Light - Sand, by default. Though, you can have other non-black color shirts (minimum of 6 needed to order):

• Looks like this
• ParadoxDruid modeling the front
• Robo_Leader modeling the front

Dark - Black, by default. Though, you can have other dark-colours (minimum of 8 needed to order):

• Looks like This (Though, the white displays as pink for some reason. See Here for a more accurate picture)
• CubanRefugee modeling the front
• CubanRefugee modeling the back
• Ozmodiar modeling the front

The link below (or the title link) will take you to the thread with more information and how to order

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Greetings Lions, Friends, Regulars!

Basically, for reasons which you can read in this post, we've had to change the IP address of all TLD servers. In an attempt to notify as many of you fellows as possible, I have been and will continue to post news in all the places we usually do so.

Why wouldn't your favorites just update automatically, you ask? Without getting too technical, the subdomain "games.dongues.net" that I have always encouraged you guys to use DOES always point to the proper place, and is already working with the new location of the server. However, when you enter that address into TF2 in favorites, it stores ONLY the current IP, not the "games.dongues.net", so it only holds the old information.

You now have a few ways you can get to TLD, which I'll mention in most preferable to least:

• You can make an alias that always points to the latest info for TLD, which is totally futureproof. It's the first tip in the thread, titled "Connect to Lions Server Easily"
• You can add the new IP to your favorites either by entering "games.dongues.net:27015" or "96.44.130.2:27015" - when adding to favorites it means the same thing anyway!
• You can manually connect through the console using "games.dongues.net:27015" or "96.44.130.2:27015".

That's all for now -- I'm going to go ahead and link this everywhere I can. I have also left a 4-slot, locked dummy server up on the old IP so that anyone who has it bookmarked can see what the new IP is. Any assistance you can give spreading the word to others who may have missed the notices about the move, never seen the forums, etc, etc is greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, comments, etc, please feel free to reply here or contact me elsewhere if it's more time sensitive.

Oh, and if you believe you can simplify the examples for connecting above any, feel free to let me know. I want this to be as accessible as possible.

Edit/Update: This has been resolved, and the server is back up and running. The original text is below

As a followup to the previous post, we've now identified the problem and are attempting to solve it. We have some donation funds leftover from last time, but we need additional donations to cover all the parts and supply some more fallback for the next time something happens. I'm too lazy at the moment to convert the thread on this over to HTML from BBCode at the moment, so please visit the thread either by clicking the title of this post or by clicking here. I'll likely convert it over later tonight or tomorrow

I've also put notices on Twitter, IRC, The Forums, and The Steam Groups' Announcement Pages. Hopefully everyone'll see one of them.

How to Donate

• You can paypal to jeffsugar AT gmail DOT com (preferred)
• If you have a credit/debit card but no paypal, you can donate directly using the big donate link just below this list. It's hard to miss, as it's big and yellow and says "DONATE" :v
• You can send a check or money order or cash to my address, if that floats your boat. Address available upon PM'd request.
• Some other way I haven't thought of?

Yes, the server is down. The drive the operating system was on died, and we're trying to recover what we can from it. The drive that has the actual TF2 server info and such is fine. It'll be up as soon as we can get the data and reinstall the OS.

I've also put notices on Twitter, IRC, The Forums, and The Steam Groups' Announcement Pages. I received many messages asking what's up, so I figured I should put it here as well. That's 6 places, and almost all of them link to each other in one way or another. Hopefully everyone'll see one of them.

Here is a copy of what i posted on the steam forums, where quite a few are already supporting the idea including some high-profile members of the TF/Steam community. I'd like you guys to help out too, if you're willing! You can read here or in the thread on the STEAM forums and then please reply there supporting it :)

The Post

Not quite sure how to start off this post, because the concept of this suggestion is rather basic in nature. Logging has been implemented in every major program that includes chat that I can think of that I've ever used at this point, except Steam. Whether it's fully rich text, or plain text, or some other wacky method, logging is a good idea to have in a program.

Now, when discussing finally posting a thread about this (as well as one other thread, which I will post later) with Richard_Eid, he mentioned the largest issue would likely be that it would take a while to design a log viewer for the logs. But, to be quite honest, the people who want logging most likely wouldn't require a manager/viewer to start. Even with mIRC, the log viewer just allows a listing of the directory and you choose a file. Most people, including me, go straight to the logs folder and pick out what they want. Therefore, while a log viewer would be nice, it is worth forgoing one in order to have some kind of logging functionality in Steam. Heck, there could be a button in steam to just open to the logs folder and let people go from there.

Another potential issue that I discussed with Rich was the naming scheme for files, since people change their display names all the time. This can be solved by a variety of naming schemes, all leading back to the communityid of the person. I could suggest a lot of different solutions to this, but I'll just list the one that sounds nicest to me:

• Store all logs from a person in a folder that has their Community ID (eg 76561197983340435 for Richard_Eid). This would allow future proofing for a log viewer at some point, that could read the community ID and get a name from it.
• All text files inside could be labeled starting with a timestamp of when the conversation started (and written when the steam window is closed, or periodically, or just one text file per day -- with that last one being the best, probably)
• After the timestamp could perhaps be their display name at the time, stripped of illegal file/folder name characters such as ":". This would let you search for someone by a name, if you wanted. If not, you could at least do an in-file search for the display name
• So, to recap: At the bare minimum, a collection of log files timestamped for each day or per session inside of a folder with their community ID. A person could even write a third party viewer until you guys got around to writing one.
• That's really it. I can't imagine it would be that hard to dump text to a /logs/communityid/TIMESTAMP.txt file.

I could go further with this post, but I think I've been more than long-winded enough already. Hopefully others will support this, and we can get it done. Compared to something as giant as the Comments system, this seems like it should be fairly simple to implement.

Alright, so I'm finally putting something newsworthy on the front page by crossposting from the forums 8) I'm so cool. Anyways, see the following:

Long Version

Ok, so here's the background. As you've probably noticed, we've been having issues lately with severe lag. We've also had some crashes, but those are a result of TF2 and not us. The lag, however, is local. It's something with the physical machine or connection at the data center. That's the downside to a colocated box: you want to fix it, you pay :v There's a catch, though: we're not quite sure what's wrong, so we need some spare parts and such to swap out and test. It's not very expensive compared to how much we'd have needed if not for Kate or if we'd been hosting with GameServers, though.

So, while I don't like making threads like this (asking for donations makes me feel not good), those who would normally donate have certainly saved a lot over the past year since the last donation thread. In that time, quite a few people have offered to donate. I was honest in response: "We don't [i]need[/i] any right now, but anything you donate will certainly go towards the server" -- Unfortunately, that resulted in the majority not winding up doing the donations, so currently we are in need of monies!

I don't have a "goal" amount at the moment, for a few reasons. Firstly, we're going with the most likely causes first. How much money we need/use in the end will depend entirely upon what winds up fixing it. It could be sub-$100 or it could be much more than that.

Either way, anything you can give is appreciated so that we're not paying out of pocket to fix it. If we wind up with extra, I will hold it for next time or be willing to refund partial donations for whatever's not used -- whatever you want.

Short Version

We need monies to fix things. Please donate :v I plan to keep an ongoing list of names and amounts donated to give credit where credit's due. If you don't want yourself mentioned or don't want the amount mentioned, please mention such.

How to Donate

• You can paypal to jeffsugar AT gmail DOT com (preferred)
• You can send a check or money order or cash to my address, if that floats your boat. Address available upon PM'd request.
• Some other way I haven't thought of?

Edit: You can also use this:

Donations Thus Far

• Listed in the thread

It's true! It's a front-site! Soon, I will further edit this to have actual content. In the meantime, enjoy the new top headerbar and feel free to visit the forums as per usual.

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