Erik

The downtime this morning was a result of me removing some old IPs on our machine we no longer utilize. Once I dropped the IPs from bind the machine stopped responding and needed someone at the data center to console it for a restart. I lost a beautiful 277 days of uninterrupted uptime but all is back online now. Sorry for the downtime I really tried to keep our IP migration to zero downtime.

Site rippers aka download managers are the dirty underbelly of the internet ... but the good news is we'll be adding partial file download resume to the site on the next software upgrade. From the looks of it we'll be able to select member groups who have access to it as it's a rather intensive addition. We'll keep you posted. Erik

That's funny I never looked at her mag. The article says man wounded ... I wonder if that means she threw the gun at him when it wouldn't fire and it dislocated his finger or something. God you know she's the laughing stock of the department especially after being front page news. Poor Police Cpt is probably still in tears.

no wedding ring? I give.

You just don't mess with Texas girls ... you just don't.

I love the UK and when I see things about all the big brother stuff there it freaks me out that it's publicly acceptable.

Fixed. We were trying to implement some new features and we botched it. Sorry we'll be more careful in the future. Please let me know if everything has returned to normal for you. Erik

I apologize for the downtime we experienced Sunday evening. Our data center where the server is located experienced an outage affecting the entire facility. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Regards; Erik Thompson CombatACE.com

SD You should post those up in the gallery ... because seriously just one pic is a tease. <<chuckles>> Erik

Do you think times like these are where songs like "she thinks my tractor's sexy" come from? Very nice though ... good on ya! Erik

I've got two support tickets into Invision right now and this is one of them. This one has to do with searching the download section. IPB opens the connection to the DB but then never closes it. Once the DB reaches its user limit we start getting those "can't connect to DB" error messages. The fix maybe installing a new search engine for the site which wouldn't terribly disappoint me anyway. :) I'l keep you guys posted and thanks for reporting this. Erik

A specific user action on the site is causing an insert of user name instead of display name into the cache table. Until I can duplicate the problem I can only continue to look for it. I've submitted a ticket to Invision and we're working through the details. I have no estimated time for repair as this is a minor bug which fixes itself as the cache table is refreshed. I'll let you know when I have more information. Just to clarify 3 days to locate and fix such a minor bug is an unreasonable expectation considering the size of our code base. Thank you for making me aware of the details however. Regards; Erik Thompson CombatACE.com

LOL ... No this is a true story. While visiting Perth, one hot day, I ordered some iced tea. The waitress brings me a glass filled mostly with ice and the rest with tea. I drank some and it was moderately cold so I decided to let it sit and stir it occasionally so it would get colder. 10 minutes later the tea is still not really cold like I expected. The glass was sweating, the ice was getting smaller, but the tea wasn't cold. Knowing ice is at least 0C (32F) we started laughing and making jokes about, "crikee we musta got us some of that ozzie ice." The waitress over hearing the conversation asked if something was wrong with my tea. I said no but she left and appears a couple minutes later from the kitchen with a thermometer that had obviously been in the refrigerator but looked like one you stick in a turkey. She drops the thing in my glass and goes to get a new glass of tea. When she comes back the termometer said 17C (62F) and yes it had been in the glass the whole time. Not being able to explain it we all were convinced that Australia is the only place on Earth you can get 62 degree F ice. You figure it out. Erik

Yeah but ... Australia is the only place on earth you can get 62 degree ice. It's like the 8th wonder of the world.

The fundamental idea is to include more membership perks while still providing for the free segment of our community. Modders have perks that paid and non-paid members do not. So keeping in line with that philosophy paid members have perks that free members do not. Another way to look at our new community based model is that our modders give to the community with their contributions and our paid members give to the community financially. Both segments are required to keep the site open for EVERYONE to enjoy. If we had stayed with the 100% free community model by next month we would be shutting the doors. We fealt that wasn't an agreeable position for anyone knowing everyone would loose out. Of course some wealthy billionaire might hang out here and endow the site with a massive cash infusion to ensure it's continued operation but so far we've not met up with one of those. If you happen to know any please send them our way. Our new model is based on a simple design of the more you give the more you get. It's the fairest 100% community driven, supported, and maintained structure we could come up with that would allow access to all segments of viewers. Stay tuned there's more to come with the new ideas we're fostering behind the scenes to refine an organizational plan that will allow CombatACE and the community a bright foreseeable future. Show your support for our efforts subscribe today. Erik Thompson CombatACE.com

Wow that sounds like an internet security suite and not just anti-virus.

What kind of anti-virus software do you use? The best software is believe it or not FREE. I'd seriously consider removing your old costly AV software and go to: http://free.grisoft.com/ I'll bet your problems go away after that. ;)

Hello Everyone; I'd like to take a few moments to announce some new opportunities and features here at CombatACE.com. Before I talk about the new features, it is important to outline some history and facts. Just a short year and half ago when MK2 decided to step up and provide for this community, our membership hovered around 3,000. Today it is nearing 30,000. In the early days of our community it was common for us to provide five to six hundred Gigabytes (GB) of data transfer each month. Currently, in line with our continuing growth in the community, our consumption demands have grown exponentially and are now measured not in GB but in Tera bytes (TB) (1TB = 1000GB) each month. We're pleased with the growth of the community and the popularity of all the available downloads and site wide features and assets. We would like to continue that forward momentum with an idea geared toward member support that will work seamlessly with the daily download limits currently in use. As I mentioned, CombatACE has been solely supported by a single benefactor, MK2, for over a year and half. Our monthly expenses average roughly 500.00 USD and in total over $11,000.00 USD have been invested toward the continuation of the community. That said, it should be no secret that the major expense here at CombatACE is the bandwidth and physical demand incurred by our download section. The download section itself is stocked with releases from the modding community and have a combined download count over 2.5 million transfers. With that in mind, please take a moment to sign our thank you thread for MK2 ::LINK TO POST:: In the past we provided ad space which in theory should have covered the expenses, but the reality is quite another picture. Internet advertisers, even for the biggest sites, like to barter away exposure instead of paying for it. There are some exceptions but they are far and few between. For this reason our ability to offset costs with revenue generated from ads simply hasn't happened. More recent and for the past few months I'm sure you've all seen ads on the site for American Express, CompUSA, Match.com, and more. Those ads were part of our link share program we tried out as a way to generate some revenue. The basic design of this program allows for advertisers like those mentioned above to pay for actual sales instead of ad space. Using our site as an example we cluttered up the user space with banners in the expectation members would find the content interesting enough to click through to the advertiser's site and buy whatever they were selling. During our attempt at generating revenue through link share we gave away over a hundred million unique impressions, had 9,329 click throughs to advertisers, but $0.00 in sales which generated $0.00 in revenue. We've since discontinued our advertising link share program. When we rolled out the daily download limits they met with some stern objections from our members. We knew then that as a temporary solution to limiting our exposure we'd need to come up with a plan to allow members the option to upgrade their individual accounts. Our new member subscriptions fill that need nicely in an affordable way to not only give you unlimited access to downloads but provide you with an opportunity to show support for your community. Subscription Plans offer: Unlimited access to downloads Larger storage limits for onsite images and files More flexible member benefits for posting and board access More profile features Member badges and identification identifying you as a proud contributor and supporter Today's new release of member subscription accounts won't affect our non-subscriber accounts. Everyone who has joined or will join our community starts with a free non-subscriber account, and those free accounts will retain the download limits. On top of this, we will now offer paid subscription accounts that will lift all the download restrictions. The new subscription accounts are easy to purchase and are handled through PayPal for secure, private, and convenient access. Member subscriptions are available in 1 month, 6 month, and 1 year plans. Designed to allow our members access to more site features, more storage, and more downloads it's a perfect fit for the CombatACE in you. Click the banner below to go to your subscription area and sign up for a plan today. Support the community that supports you! UNLOCK YOUR DOWNLOADS CLICK HERE

For all you've done for the community. For being there when we needed it most. For just being you. Thank You! - Add your reply below to show your support -

Ahhh looks like someone made his 30th post and graduated to a "Junior Member". Looks good on you too. Erik

OMG that IS hilarious. Disgusting but hilarious. I guess the bottom line is eatable underwear gets new meaning.

Well I'm not sure you need to worry about it, but if you want to remove it you can always boot to a command prompt. Then change to the directory of the file and remove it. More than likely it's a 0 Byte file. Do some googling on some step by step instructions. That way I'm not liable if you remove something you shouldn't. LOL E

There is also the lei-er but that's a whole different set of rules.

All is fixed. This got uploaded on Saturday when I was making changes to the download section and got put into a category that is the parent for the terrains sub category which wasn't supposed to be uploadable to and downloadable from. So once uploaded there I changed the options for the parent which in effect locked the file into an area which can't be downloaded from. I moved this to it's correct sub category which you can download from and all is fixed. Sorry it took me so long to realize what the heck was going on. At least now if we find others that got locked out we'll know where to start looking first. Erik

All is fixed. This got uploaded on Saturday when I was making changes to the download section and got put into a category that is the parent for the terrains sub category which wasn't supposed to be uploadable to and downloadable from. So once uploaded there I changed the options for the parent which in effect locked the file into an area which can't be downloaded from. I moved this to it's correct sub category which you can download from and all is fixed. Sorry it took me so long to realize what the heck was going on. At least now if we find others that got locked out we'll know where to start looking first. Erik