News

As Neal mentioned yesterday, these forums have now hit 20,000 posts. I promised the possibility of more fun stats today, and I just thought I would oblige.

The stats program for our website categorizes traffic to the site on several categories. Briefly, here's a rundown of how that works:



Why is this important, you ask? Well, it will help you understand the following numbers:



Now, you might be wondering why that info is important. More likely, you've already figured it out. But for the sake of argument, I'll spell it out here: each one of those numbers is the highest the site has ever recorded. Ever. The basic upshot is that October of 2003 has been, yet again, the biggest month for traffic that the site has ever had. Several months this year have had high numbers in one category or another, but October is the first month that we have ever set records in every category across the board.

In other news, while October was a relatively quiet month in chat, chatstats will show you one fun little fact; since we first started tracking chat stats in January of 2002, we have logged over one million lines in channel #narshe.

Thanks to all the loyal visitors, yet again, who have made this possible!

CoN forums have reached 20,000 posts, an excellent landmark. The way the posts are stacking up, it's anyone's guess as to when we reach 30,000. If I were to make a guess, I'd say around April or May of 2004, unless the number of posts continues to increase. The 20,000th post was made by the site webmaster, Rangers51, in the Dragon Quest 5 Remake thread.

For those of you that aren't reading this through the forums and aren't members yet, consider joining up.

As you've already seen if you've read this CoN news article on the healing potential of video games, we have hired Phoenix as a new News Editor. Phoenix will be the third news staffer, working in conjunction with Administrator Elena99 and Moderator SSJ_Cloud.

Phoenix, as noted in his staff biography, is currently a freshman in Uni, having finished high school early. He has a good writing style, has been willing to help whenever possible in the months since his return to the site, and is an all-around good guy.

Everyone, please join me and the staff in welcoming Phoenix to his new position at Caves of Narshe. We're all looking forward to working more directly with him!

Today sees three new Mozilla releases. For the uninitiated, Mozilla is the open source software that rose from the flames of once mighty Netscape Navigator/Communicator, though long-time detractors from the frankly awful Netscape 4 will be pleased to note that it bears very little relation to today's Mozilla products.

Along with the main Mozilla Suite 1.5 release (the suite featuring Navigator for browsing, Mail & Newsgroups, Composer, and various integrated bits, much like the old Netscape Communicator) come new versions of the increasingly popular (and highly recommended by many CoN staff and regulars) standalone applications based on Mozilla code: web browser Mozilla Firebird 0.7 and e-mail client Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3. While these are pre-release software, they have both been shown to be extremely reliable in the past, and this should be especially true of these releases, the first to be built from a release branch of the Mozilla code. Should you require the ultimate in stability, you might prefer Mozilla Suite 1.4.1, released earlier this week.

Not even remotely Final Fantasy or even gaming news, but it falls broadly under the umbrella of site news, since we've recommended Mozilla browsers for the best experience viewing the site (and browsing the Web in general) for some time now. Standards compliant, free and, especially in the case of Firebird and Thunderbird, light, fast, and user-friendly. What more do you want?

Download:

• Mozilla Firebird 0.7
• Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3
• Mozilla 1.5
• Mozilla 1.4.1
• Downloads via BitTorrent and builds optimised for specific CPU types or with varied feature sets can frequently be found at the MozillaZine forums.

Sixteen new fanarts were added to the database today, something I should've done for quite a while. I hate making this news because that means I've put off the update until I need to do a ton in one day. But check out the new art as well as the rest of the database in the
fanart section.

The database features new art from Katy, Narratorway, Zephir, Hikaroo, Kame, Luna Chan, Yuki Usagi, Denisse, Chris Soleto, and SilverMaduin. CoN's fanart gallery continues to grow into one of the biggest and best on the net thanks to everyone who submits, so again, thanks to all submitters.

Although this newest installment to Narratorway's Lights series has actually been around since February, it has only been put on the site just now.

This one is about Relm, called Relm: The Wandering Light . It's a very emotional piece, though written in a style that you would not think would convey that sort of emotion. Definitely worth your time to read, as is the rest of his Lights series, which is viewable in our FF6 fanfiction section.