Flash Client Upgrade

We have, for quite a while now, offered TFlash as our web based IRC client. This was originally written as a quick replacement for the Java client we used previously. TFlash has, however, stood up to the test of time and has proved to be a very popular client amongst users.

We have now decided that it is time to upgrade TFlash to make it bigger and better. To this end, we contracted Mike Parks (BigRedPimp) of thinkrightgames.com to carry out the work. He is an incredibly experienced Flash developer and has made an exceptional job of the new Flash Client.

Today we have launched this new client and it should now be embedded on all of the sites that had the old Flash client embedded.

Development of the client started in early December and, since then, a team of testers have tirelessly tested it and removed bugs. We thank them for their help. If you do however find a bug, please report it using the address at the top of the new flash client.

BigRedPimp has put in a huge amount of effort with this project and we thank him unreservedly for his time and for doing this project for such a low cost. We are glad to call him a friend of GeekShed.

If you have any questions about the new Flash client, please come and see us in #help on irc.geekshed.net.

You can see the new TFlash at http://www.geekshed.net/chat/

Login Service

We have, for a while now, had a login service which links to our services database to allow you to login to areas of the site, such as the quote database, using your services login. This has always been an experimental feature however we are now happy that it’s working great and have finalized it. We have applied an SSL certificate to the site to allow your username and password to be encrypted as it passes over the Internet for our auth service to verify.

We hope to be able to use this service in the future for lots of cool areas of the site including web based nickname and channel registration.

Normal service is resumed

Due to an over keen data-centre staff member inadvertently taking one of our servers from its rack and formatting it, we have suffered an extended period of downtime for some of our services. These services include RSS topic feeds and User Count badges.

A new server was brought online today and we have restored the information from backups to this server. Normal service is now resumed.

If you notice any problems, let us know in #help on irc.geekshed.net.