News

If you have registered in the last week or so, you may not have gotten your validation email; if you have signed up for topic subscriptions, email notification of new PMs, or any other email feature of CoN, you may have noticed the same.

We appear to be having some sort of issues with email sending at the forums right now, and we are trying to track down the source. In the meantime, here is what you can do:

• If you signed up but did not get a validation email, please send an email to climhazzard@cavesofnarshe.com from the email address you used to sign up. If Clim is feeling benevolent, he'll forward the message along to the admins for manual validation.
• If you have signed up for some other sort of email notification but are not getting the emails, also email Climhazzard using the email address you used to sign up. Include your forum username so we can track the errors.
• Ensure that your ISP or email provider is allowing email from the cavesofnarshe.com domain.

My hope is that we can diagnose and fix this issue before anyone even has a chance to respond to this message. But feel free to email if you have any problems at all.

Tiddles and I have been in the process of moving CoN to a new box for the past week or so. We think the thing is just about ready to go, so we're going to fieldtest it by directing traffic to it starting tomorrow. We're planning on porting the DNS over early tomorrow morning on the American east coast, but that's contingent on me waking up, really.

Those of you who have been with us for a while are probably have a vague recollection of the routine. But here's how it will go.

• We will first close the forums.
• We will back up an absolutely current database for the forums, and copy that database to the new machine.
• We will open the forums on the new machine.
• We will move the DNS entry for cavesofnarshe.com to point to the new server.

Now, this is technobabble to most, but what it boils down to is this: for a while, the forums will be closed. They will appear to reopen for different people at different times, due to differences in ISPs updating their data. Everyone, assuming all goes well, should be back in no later than Monday morning EDT.

So, there's not much to discuss here, so just let me know if you need clarification on this move or if you want anything explained. It makes me feel like less a nerd if someone actually wants to know more.

I normally don't use news to draw attention to site polls on the main site, but in this case I'd like to. Please visit any page of the content area of the site, and vote on the poll regarding Adopt a Chocobo. We're reconsidering its place and future with CoN, and we'd like your input. Thank you.

The CoN image demons have been hard at work again - you might recall us adding sections for "Official Art" for Final Fantasy I, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy VII all pretty recently. Thanks to Neal and Kame, though, we've added even more art in the form of bonus art captures from FF Anthology and some scans from Nintendo Power magazine. The affected galleries include those for Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI.

In the realm of Final Fantasy VII, again thanks to Neal (and, of course, myself), you'll see filmstrips containing selected frames from every Limit Break in the game. You can find them on the Limit Break and the Characters pages.

Hope you enjoy the new eye candy we've given you, and as always watch this forum to find out what we're doing as we do it.

As many of you may already know, we're adding a new affiliate today, Heroes of Ivalice. You all know I'm not a big fan of pen-and-paper or text-based RPGs, but Kairo's concept is so good, and he's so passionate about it that I wanted to share it with everyone via CoN. Of course, I can't explain it properly, so check out his thread to learn more.



Also, those of you who follow our fanart galleries often may recognize the name Lindsay Cibos. She's a very talented artist who has an image in our Fanart Hall of Fame. Well, now she's got another claim to fame - Tokyopop has recently published her shojo manga "Peach Fuzz." When you can read about an artist in your local newspaper, who has donated to CoN, you know she's getting to the big time. Check her out at her own site and learn more.



Finally, I've heard a rumor that another artist at CoN is iin talks for a publishing deal and is close to closing a contract up. I won't say who because I don't want to jinx it, and I don't want you all to guess for the same reason. But keep your fingers crossed anyway.

The Washington state legislature announced on 1 March that they will seek a bill this term to hold video game companies responsible for any violent acts perpetrated "in any part due to playing video games," according to Seattle's KOMO (with secondary reporting by Games Are Fun). We've seen similar rumblings before over the years, of course, so this is merely presumptive at this point. However, the bill is currently in committee in the Washington State House of Representatives; upon approval - which is not at all unlikely - from its committee, it will be brought to the floor of the full House for a vote. (For more, locate a torrent of that one episode of "Conjunction Junction" that everyone's heard of.)

The implications of this Washington bill are potentially far-reaching. After all, two of the big three console manufacturers/first-party developers, Microsoft and Nintendo, find their American headquarters in Redmond. Whether the presence of these juggernauts is a contributing factor to the emergence of the bill is currently and will likely be forever unknown - however, if the developers can be held responsible for the actions of the gamers who play their games, it stands to reason that those who sell the platforms on which the games are played could be next.

Video game censorship and regulation has been an issue ever since games truly broke into the forefront of the American culture, over twenty years ago. So while it's easy to say that this bill is an offshoot of the swing toward conservatism in the last election, it's hard to make that case when the bill arose in the perennially blue state of Washington. Without a easy target for the issue, then, what potential reasons are there to introduce this legislation?