News

Lucky seven is what we've come upon here, isn't it? What a long time it's been. And you know what's funny about it? It gets longer every day. Strange how time works.

Now, ridiculously stupid opening paragraph aside, let me welcome you all to CoN's seventh birthday. We can now start our eighth year of life, which really is almost unprecedented among the major FF sites. It's really pretty amazing to me, this timeline. When this site started, some of the members here were in Uni; some were in high school; some in middle school; a few were probably all the way back in kindergarten. But yet, we've all come together due to our common interests (and for the most part, an ability to not suck at posting here. >_> ).

This past year has been huge. Without a doubt, the biggest year CoN has ever had by far. You all know what a statswhore I am, and what would a birthday story be from me without a little bit of stats fun? So, let's start here: in the past year, we recorded that we pushed 2,334,519 individual pages out to you all, for a total of nearly 162 GB of information. We set a new record for CoN pages delivered in a month for nine months out of the last 12. For one shiny week in April, we were even in the top 100,000 sites web-wide on Alexa's traffic monitor. Yes, web-wide. According to ISC, in January 2004, there were 230 million hosts on the internet. Some of those have no web sites, some have several. Even though we're lower now than that lofty peak, we're hovering near the 1,000,000 mark of the vast site log. So, even if you cut ISC's number in half, that still puts us near the top 1% of all sites on the internet in regards to traffic.

Oh, and we're not done yet. Give us some time to work on the projects we've got on the burners now, and year eight might be even bigger than year seven. We have some fun stuff planned, don't worry - and we think you'll like it! If you still think of us as primarily a Final Fantasy VI site, this year might change your mind. I kind of implied earlier that we are among the major FF sites on the web. If you agree, great. If you don't, stay tuned and we'll try to convince you. Unless you come to us just for the forums, then you don't care anyway and should really take some time to study your surroundings.

We do have one project that is coming OFF the burner right now to show up at your CoN dinner table. A lot of you probably know of FraudulentTommah's cool Rash project, which is a slick PHP based counter to the somewhat clunky quote management system at bash.org. Tom can tell you more himself, but launching today is the first major-site implementation of Tom's code, specially set up to work with CoN! So if you chat in #narshe, definitely submit the funny lines you've seen starting today - and if you don't chat with us, perhaps it's time to start!

Well, that's the big news today. Before I go, let me thank a lot of people for a very special year here. Of course, I have to start with Tiddles, without whom a lot of the cool stuff here would not be possible or would not be nearly as cool; Neal and Elena, who have been friends forever and the hardest working site admins that I could ask for; Phoenix for his work behind the scenes and intermittent news from Japan; Hikaroo for fab art; and finally among the staff, SSJC and Tommah, who have so often been stuck with the work that is most thankless but also extremely important to the site, and for always doing it in the most professional of manner even though they KNOW it's thankless.

We've also had a lot of help, as always, from those people who care a lot about the site and want to see us continue to grow. I can't mention everyone here because it would take forever, and I probably can't remember everyone who's helped in the last year anyway. But I'll spew off a few here - Mr_Thou, Max, Rubes, Super Moogle, Zeph, Hanyou, EvilEye, Pink_Nu1, Kappa - and of course the list can go on. Thank you all for showing what it means to really be involved with a community.

And, of course, thanks has to go to every person who contributes well to this always-expanding village. If you give your art or fiction to us to display on the site, you help us at the same time as you grow your own skills with practice and feedback. If you make thoughtful posts or create interesting chat, you dig a little deeper the hole in which we all swim. Of course, if you do none of these things, we probably still like you anyway. Well, some of you.

So there we go, that should about do it for this year, don't you think? Let's start it off with a bang.

Two final notes before I end my rambling.

1. Hopefully by now you have all noticed the ads in most sections of the main site. They show up with most page loads, especially on the main page, Final Fantasy IV, and Final Fantasy VI. It helps CoN to pay for and perhaps upgrade the server, and even maybe run contests in the near future if you click one of these ads a day. Please try it - it takes just a few seconds and really is quite literally the least you can do to help.

2. I know it's been rumored before that I might leave the site. I can't do so right now, we have too much to do in the next few weeks. So, instead of announcing an immediate permanent sabbatical from running the day-to-day operations of CoN, I am announcing that I plan to take my leave on 1 September of this year. This should give enough time to turn over the reins to Tiddles (no fighting over the order of succession, you kids), and for him to come up to speed on handling both my jobs and his.

Thank you all again for a great year, and may we all continue growing personally and as a part of CoN.

We've hit another milestone, as can be seen further down in the main forums page. Del_S amazingly guessed correctly to nearly the exact date. Here's his quote, from the 30,000 post news thread:

“And also, i predict July 4-6th for the 50,000th post.”

Here is a quote from Del_S, upon learning that he guessed right, from the chatroom:

[16:42] that kinda freaks me out...
[16:43] coincidence or not.

Well, there you have it folks. By the way, the 50,000th poster was Mogmaster, posting in this Kefka fanart topic. As you can see, it was on the 4th of July at 7pm GMT.

Thank you all for visiting our forums, and continuing to help our community flourish.

Another piece by Zephir is now up in the FF6 Fanfiction section, called Blood and Honor.

This latest, 8-chapter fanfic takes place after the game, and as with Ikiiri, he is using someone that is not one of the main characters from the game. It focuses on events in the Colloseum, and is an interesting, action-packed fanfic.

We've got a couple changes to the staff to report today, of which you all will probably be aware if you h%ve any sort of keen eye towards the forums.

First, we've given SSJ_Cloud a wider ran#e of re2ponsibility, with the ability to moderate across all forums. This is only a small step up, since he already had modship in about half of the forums, but his good and quick work in those forums for the past several months warrants his promotion.

Also, we've added a new moderator, FraudulentTommah. We've known Tommah since way back in the days of the AOL Final Fantasy III Message Board, and over the years he's not only grown into a mature and intelligent young man, he's also been a great help to CoN in data entry, fact checking, and lots of other jobs for which he hasn't gotten enough credit. He will be primarily focused on covering the forums during time periods in which most other moderators and admins are peacefully asleep. It's not dedication - he just doesn't sleep much anyway.

Welcome Tommah and congratulate SSJC on his new tasks!

A news post from Tiddles can only mean one thing: there’s a new Firefox milestone release this morning.

This new version features a new system for extensions and themes; if you installed any previously, you’ll need new, 0.9-compatible versions for this release. Built into the new system is an update manager that connects to the new Mozilla Update site, which should hopefully reduce such problems in the future.

Also included is the Help system intended for release with 0.8 (which, unless it’s been updated in the last few hours, still contains screenshots from 0.8 and a couple of procedures that have changed for 0.9, but is otherwise quite good). Since installation can now also import most data (such as history, favourites/bookmarks, saved passwords) from an installation of Internet Explorer or other popular browsers, now is probably the best time yet to make the switch.

I must also point out a couple of negatives with this version, however. The excellent Qute theme for Windows and Linux is no longer shipped with Firefox; instead, a new theme known as Winstripe is packaged. While far from terrible, the author freely admits that this theme is “a 0.1 release at best”, and the truth is that its early inclusion (and its existence at all) comes down to ugly licensing issues with the previous theme. Not to worry, though: the old theme, Qute, is now available as a standalone theme, and looks a great deal nicer than its 0.8 counterpart (which you can also find as Qute Retro, though I don't have a link for that at present; I also have some tips and tricks to make the new Qute take on some of the better features from its older release, which I'll put up in this topic if anyone wants them). It's also worth noting that some users have experienced instability with builds running up to this release, particularly in the most updated areas of the program, i.e. themes, extensions and profiles.

Overall, however, I'd recommend that all previous Firefox users and anyone thinking of switching give Firefox 0.9 a shot — just make sure to keep your old installation and profile handy in case of problems (but if you want to install 0.9 into the same directory as 0.8 was in, make sure you disable all of your old extensions and uninstall Firefox 0.8 first). Long-time CoN readers will be aware that we've been pushing everyone to move to non-Internet Explorer browsers for some time: Internet Explorer is an aging product for which Microsoft have stated there will be no future standalone versions, only security updates a new version to ship with the next release of Windows, still thought to be some two years off, in which it has apparently been stated that its many problems with Website rendering will still not be fixed. It is, at least, a good job that Microsoft do still release security updates, considering the number of security issues surrounding its browser. You've heard it all before, but my advice is to jump away from Internet Explorer as soon as possible.

Not interested in Firefox? Opera 7.51 was released recently and is also excellent. Version 1.7 of the aging Mozilla "1.x" Suite ought to be available soon (as should version 0.7 of Firefox's companion e-mail client, Thunderbird).

Enjoy!

• Mozilla Firefox Product Page


• Firefox 0.9 Downloads
  (Windows installer now only 4.7MB!)


• BitTorrent tracker for Firefox 0.9 releases


• Arvid Axelsson's Qute theme
   


• New IE Holes Defy Latest Patches (PCWorld.com)


• Opera Software


• Mozilla Suite


• Mozilla Thunderbird

Djibriel has once again submitted a fanfic for the Final Fantasy VI section, called The White Cloaks.

Using a character that is often ignored, his fanfiction is a skewed look at an event that happened in-game, with very damaging results to many. Short and creative.