Erik

ANNOUNCEMENT January 12, 2007 New Download Requirements In an effort to help strengthen our community we are now requiring a minimum of 5 posts in our forums for members to gain download permission. We want everyone to be involved in our community and we can't think of a better way to get you involved. Members who contribute to our community are how we stay healthy, and we need your support to help us do what we do best, provide a great community and unlimited downloads. If you receive the following message, "You do not have enough posts to download files yet." this means you haven't met the 5 post requirement. Post, download and have fun, that's our goal.

I'd take responsibility for the problems ... but it was more than likely the average of 50 - 60 Gigs of Downloads that are happening per day that is more likely the cause. Should be all fixed now ... sorry about the trouble. Erik

The Pats are my team to heck with the arguments, Fates got my back right? LOL It's going to be a good game either way.

January 21, 2007 Hi - I removed the 5 post minimum requirement so that all members can now download from our site even with zero posts. That happened last week as I posted about it earlier in this thread. Hopefully that will make things easier for everyone and clear some things up. Above I have placed a new poll into action. With the recent site move it would be helpful to get an idea of our performance. Your help would be greatly appreciated in letting me know how we're doing. Also there are some new benefits to members. I won't go into detail but they should make all of you quite happy. Access to your features will become apparent as you use this site. You will be automatically upgraded as you post during normal daily use of the boards. It may take a few posts to get all your upgrades in place as they're done one at a time, and some of you won't upgrade at all depending on your activity level. There may be more details to come but it will have to be when I'm not so completely exhausted. Enjoy the new stuff it's here for you. Tell your friends and lets make our home "the place to be". Oh yeah don't forget to vote in the above poll. Take care everyone; Erik Thompson CombatACE.com

That's a DNS Migration issue. A side affect of having moved the site and changing our IP address where the site resides. When this happens we actually request a repopulation of our IP through the name servers of the world. That process is spotty and strange at times especially with routers and gateways in the millions. For you specifically if your Internet Service Provider uses different machines to host name servers then one of them might not just be updated yet. Or you possibly have your browser set up to cache pages which are referring to our old site. Check your browser settings, clear your browser cache, and reboot. If the problem still exists it's because your ISP's name servers aren't all up to date. The good news is that they will update, as this process generally settles down in about 72 hours. Which for us will be tomorrow or possibly monday depending on when I actually submitted our name servers. It was late and I was tired I remember that much. If this problem continues past Monday be sure to let me know and I'll put in a trouble ticket to our upstream provider. Erik

Wouldn't care if the model had no wings. It's great to see contributions from the A-Team. Nice Job! ps - it has nice wings

NO, It does not mean that at all. Sounds like a browser and cookie setting issue to me. What browser are you using? Do you allow cookies from our site. I'd recommend FireFox and allowing us to set cookies, or you won't be able to stay logged in for more than one page without cookies. Regards; Erik

If you're trying to download a file why would you be clicking an "upload" button? I'm confused. Let me know.

Please read the following knowing that my intention and thoughts are always about the membership, the community, and its collective health. Also please understand my reluctance in responding to this thread further. A big THANK YOU to all the supporters and folks who can see that a community like this takes more than just people who join and call themselves members so they have access to free "everything". To all the others here are my closing thoughts. --- I've re-read all my posts and can't find anywhere I said anything about or eluded to money. I simply can't find those references. What I did say is: The site benefits from a member's activity. Each post that is made and is picked up by a search engine like google makes us stronger on the net. As our knowledge base grows from members questions and interaction so does the strength of our site. A community that interacts and plays together is stronger more vibrant and fluid. The more our site gains interest and popularity the more we're willing to support it through faster downloads, more downloads, more features. etc. Modders are more likely to interact and participate in a site that is active and shows professional support for their endeavors. We've begged folks to get involved with give-aways, contests, and the like with little activity to show for it. We ask for something from the membership and they complain, say it's stupid, and overall let us know we're foolish. When our membership asked for a better, faster, cleaner place I can't remember us calling them idiots. Members that participate in our community should be rewarded with access and features. Members that don't should be restricted from full use of our resources. It's a give and take relationship. There's much much more that goes along with the big picture than just the above. I'm also confident that each of you reading this can understand why I even care enough to be bothered with seeking support for such ideas. If you folks can't or won't see it because 5 posts is way too much to ask for, then you'll just have to live with the outcome. I've removed the 5 post minimum. Our next moderation won't be announced and you won't have a voice in the decision. Before today many of you never had a voice anyway so I'm sure it won't matter. If you're one of the "active" members in our community I applaud you and give you the green light ops go on all those that would otherwise take that away from you. I'm deeply saddened by the "use it loose it" view point shared in all this. I suppose it was a good learning experience and not a total loss. Here's wishing you all the best. Erik Thompson CombatACE.com

I'm not buying into the doom and gloom theory proposed by so many. The fact that our community relies on each of YOU to be healthy and grow is undisputed. Where would YouTube be if no-one uploaded content. You simply can't have all the resources flowing in one direction. If you enjoy the community then you'll do what it takes to make it the number one resource which includes at the very least saying hello to everyone and making a few posts. I mean someone who has been here a year not making one single post or contribution to the site is just odd. You know sharing pictures of your favorite whip or commenting on someone's pictures just doesn't take that long but goes miles in keeping us active and healthy. After all, we do all this for you so you can continue to enjoy your past time and hobby. I'm just not following the logic in the complaints. We've tried so many ways to get the community involved, even the current contest of FREE products worth hundreds of dollars. That's just one of three contests we've held in the past few months with very little change in activity. Offer us some alternatives and we'll gladly listen, but to categorically cast all this doom and gloom makes me wonder why we don't just turn the downloads off. As I mentioned before we tried some options (read: contests) and thought about other options which included (read: still viable): Slower download speeds. Give membership with less than 5 posts dial up speeds. Give membership with higher than x amount posts unlimited speeds. Requiring members to post between downloads. (Read more than 5 posts would be required long term) Capping the download size to x amount per day / week / month per member. The bottom line is this is your home for downloads, why wouldn't you want to do everything possible to make it number one? If anyone has a complaint it's the modders who go without so much as a thanks, and us who can't even get our membership to say hello. --- Hey but if we shut off the downloads, just imagine the feedback we'd get then. Get involved and help us reach our goal, you've been officially invited. Regards;

Same back to you ... good to finally meet ya too. :)

I guess we'll have to go back to the original ideas. 1. Charging for downloads. 2. Filling the site with hundreds of nonsense ads. 3. Forcing you to view ads before downloading. 4. Limiting your download speeds. 5. Capping your bandwidth total per day.

Ronbo -- When your post count reaches 5 you'll be able to download.

well then if you win ... you pay us to take them off your hands ... 'doh

try again ... you might have tried to upload before i got it fixed. :)