On Saturday August 06 - or should we say the wee hours of Sunday August 07 - a group of adventurers was almost ready to call it a night. Some were so exhausted they were beginning to hallucinate. Champs thought they could heal, Captains thought they could range dps, Wardens thought they could tank!   But their intrepid leader suddenly remembered his Shakespeare:

    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of kinnies;
    For he to-day that burns his cooldowns with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne\'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition:
    And gentlemen in Louisiana now a-bed
    Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
    And hold their l33thood cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us in Ost Dunhoth!\"

And with a hearty cry of \"Once more unto the breach!\" rallied his compatriots for one more try.

And this time it worked. The Righteous became one of the few kinships on Windfola server to defeat Wound t2 Challenge.

Addendum - The Righteous is now the *only* kinship on Windfola that has completed every challenge in Ost Dunhoth save one.

Some people have reported problems linking/embedding YouTube videos in forum posts. Forum posts with YouTube links are marked as spam. So far this is only people who are regular members (as opposed to admins) of the website. Roth and I have talked and worked together on trying to figure out what causes this and the best way to resolve it.

To make a long story short we\'re stumped. It *seems* to have something to do with our Akismet anti-spam plugin/service.

Unless and until we figure this problem out:

1) Website admins can always go into Akismet panel and mark these posts as \"not spam\". After which they appear in the forum.

2) People who can\'t include YouTube videos in forum posts *can* link/embed them via the Gallery. I tested this with Dummy who is a regular member.   One can then link to the Gallery in your forum post.

We apologize for the inconvenience and will continue to try and figure this out.

On Sunday July 10 2011 a group of twelve adventurers entered Ost Dunhoth and succeeded in defeating Gortheron challenge mode on their second attempt of the night. Only two groups have managed to beat Gortheron on challenge mode. Alas Baingrist did not drop but Magdalena(?) got a groovy new cloak.

Special thanks to all who helped get us to this point over the course of several attempts. Especially Ygaer (who led the first group to win this fight) and Llothdeturtle (an exceptional raid leader).



And basking in our victory afterwards:



(Thought it would be nice to promote/celebrate some of our accomplishments on front page. We should do this more often.)

Based on recent officer meeting made a couple changes/additions to website.

1) Created an Officer membergroup.

*I added several of you to the Officer membergroup. But I don\'t know all website members/users who are also users. So please please please let me know if you are an officer and need to be added to that group.* This leads to...

2) Created an Officer only forum.

One of the main reasons for creating an Officer membergroup is so we can have a forum that can be accessed only by Officers. This is not so we can talk trash about other players in the kinship. (\"Can you believe Ngeowyn\'s new outfit? What a fashion disaster!\") This is for stuff like whether to recruit/welcome a new kinnie... policies... planning... fashion advice... good stuff like that.

3) Created a sub-forum for recruiting/applications.

One issue we talked about is a faster more deliberate way to handle people interested in joining The Righteous. So I made a sub-forum where we can post \"this is who we are\" and where people who are interested can post something about themselves.

4) Confirmed the current practice of registering people manually.

I was surprised by how much everyone likes the changes with website registration. It should be pretty quick and easy for someone to get registered by an administrator - usually I reply to game mails or emails in less than a day. This lets people access and post to our forums and away we go.

Added 2011/06/22

5) Made all officers members of Administrator as well as Officer membergroup.

This might be a mistake since some officers might not want admin powers. But clearly we need at least 3-4 officers who have the power to add new members/users. In fact looks like one officer already added a new person. Nicely done.

I know we have had some sporadic website performance problems. One thing I noticed was that our SQL database was approaching 600 megabytes which is way too much for a humble forum.

Did a database size check and noticed that 98% of the database was error messages. Most of them associated with guest users and with our Shoutbox. Purged most error messages. Hopefully that will help.